During a powerful segment, Fox News' Ed Henry tuned into the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, where CIA Director Mike Pompeo rightfully condemned The New York Times for endangering the life of a CIA officer.
"We had a publication, you work for Bret, that published the name of an undercover officer at the Central Intelligence Agency," he said. "I find that unconscionable."
Applause erupted among audience members as Henry explained what Pompeo was so upset over.
"What he was particularly angry about, the President’s CIA Director is the fact that The New York Times back in early June published an account of the new chief of Iran operations at the Central Intelligence Agency."
Henry noted that Fox News refused to share that agent's name because they were still working undercover. The Times, however, had no compunction whatsoever in endangering the life that person. Newsbusters summarizes the details and provides the segment clip above:
[The Times] noted that officials who commented on the identity of this person who's running Iran operations at the CIA spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is still working on a clandestine basis and this could, obviously, put his life in jeopardy if the Iranians figured out, if other officials around the world figure it out.
And for the same reason, this blog won’t mention their name or link to the offending article published by The New York Times. Notes of “[redacted]” are edits by this blog’s author.
The Times claimed one of the reasons they published the name was because it had appeared in other articles. Their second reason was that Donald Trump was the president. “[Redacted] is leading an important new administration initiative against Iran,” they said.
“It justified to The New York Times publishing, at least in their eyes, the name of this clandestine official because they wanted to tell the public about the Trump administration's approach to Iran and how it was going to be more aggressive than the Obama administration,” Henry explained.
In The Times report, the authors gave a description of where the officer lived, their spouse, work ethic, regions they operated in, and a detailed overview of their career and a few operations they were a part of.
It’s common practice in reporting to leave out the names of undercover officials to protect their identity and their life. But by their own admission, The New York Times published the name of the official partly due to the fact that Donald Trump was president. That is a disturbing diversion from standard protocol for largely a political reason.
It is bad enough for journalists to degrade their profession by peddling lies, half-truths and grotesquely bias reports. It is quite another to be so politically motivated that a news outlet will actually sacrifice another human being's life. This is how far the Left is willing to go, and sadly, its members feel they've the moral authority to do so. We must hold them to account.
