Rumsfeld Orders Crackdown On Leaks

By: Robert Burns, AP Military Writer (AP) Disclosure of military secrets to news organizations is hurting the government's war against terrorism, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told senior civilian and military officials.

In an internal memo, Rumsfeld lamented a "damaging lack of professionalism we continue to see on a daily basis" -- referring to a willingness by some defense officials to provide classified information to reporters.

"It is wrong. It is against the law," Rumsfeld wrote. "It costs the lives of Americans. It diminishes our country's chance for success."

Rumsfeld mentioned no specific example of a news leak, but his July 12 memo was written one week after The New York Times reported on a classified military planning document that outlined aspects of a "concept" for a U.S. war to topple Iraq's President Saddam Hussein. The document was not an actual war plan.

On July 11, a USA Today report cited a draft Iraqi invasion plan calling for the use of up to 300,000 U.S. troops.

"The disclosure of classified information is damaging our country's ability to stop terrorist acts and is putting American lives at risk," Rumsfeld wrote. He attached to the memo a brief CIA assessment of the impact of news leaks on the war against terrorism. It said Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network pays close attention to publicly available information that will help it evade U.S. intelligence.

"A growing body of reporting indicates that al-Qaida planners have learned much about our counterterrorist intelligence capabilities from U.S. and foreign media," the unclassified CIA note said.

"The cumulative effect of public disclosures of classified, terrorism-relation information -- including significant losses from such disclosures predating 11 September -- has jeopardized highly fragile and very sensitive intelligence capabilities that we require" in the war against terrorism, it added.

The CIA report was written June 14.

Rumsfeld has often spoken out about unauthorized disclosures of sensitive military information, and the Bush administration as a whole has taken a tough stance against such disclosures.

Last week, security officers at the State Department stopped a National Review magazine reporter and demanded he disclose the source of classified papers he had obtained on the U.S. visa program in Saudi Arabia.

The reporter, Joel Mowbray, said he was permitted to leave the building only after copies of the classified material that he had left in the department's press briefing room were recovered by Diplomatic Security Service officials. But a State Department official, declining to be identified, said the papers were not recovered.

At the White House on Tuesday, press secretary Ari Fleischer suggested that the administration considers it a violation of the law to possess a classified document.

"The president believes in a free and unfettered press and the president believes that the laws need to be followed and obeyed and the two should go hand in hand," Fleischer said, under questioning by reporters.

Asked which law the State Department reporter broke, Fleischer replied that the law came into play when the reporter said he had a classified cable in his hand. "It's a classified document," Fleischer said. "The law is the law and the law should be enforced. And that's consistent with the free press."

In his memo, Rumsfeld ordered senior department officials to meet with their staffs to emphasize the effort to stop leaks. Among the officials receiving the memo were Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; the top civilian and uniformed leaders of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force; the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Rumsfeld's top spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke.