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Gertz: Montaperto Receives 3 Months (from Spook 86)
U.S. counterintelligence and security officials are upset that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, were silent on the case of former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ronald Montaperto. Montaperto was sentenced to three months in prison last week for illegally keeping classified documents and passing sensitive intelligence to Chinese agents.Apparently, Mr. Rumsfeld, who has publicly criticized the disclosure of classified information to the press, is less concerned when classified data is passed to foreign intelligence services by a Defense Department employee. By contrast, 12 current and former government and military officials wrote to the judge in the case to defend Montaperto. Among the letter writers was Lonnie Henley, the U.S. intelligence community's second-most senior intelligence analyst on China. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman disagrees. Although Mr. Whitman would not say why no one from the Pentagon wrote to the judge, he said that "the severity of the sentence rests with the judge." "Protecting information vital to our national security is the responsibility of every employee of the U.S. government," he said. "It is a sacred trust that the American people expect and deserve to have upheld." Posted by: Super Hose 2006-09-27 |
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