So many third rate burglaries
by digby
Sure, it’s probably nothing:
It’s probably nothing, but the office of a major Washington, DC national security whistleblowers organization was broken into last week.
The intruder or intruders left dozens of computers and other valuable office equipment untouched but jimmied open a file cabinet at the Project on Government Oversight, a private organization that has conducted several sensitive investigations in recent months, including a critical report on a controversial Pentagon leak investigation.
The Washington Metropolitan District Police report on the Feb. 11-12 overnight incident listed its probable cause as “occupation,” which means that it was “related to the kind of business” POGO conducts, not ordinary theft, an MPD spokeswoman told Newsweek.
“Whoever did this was after information,” the investigators told POGO officials.
[…]
The purpose of the break-in remains a mystery. The lone file cabinet that was jimmied held only mundane financial items like deposit slips and blank checks, Rutter said. A few employees reported that papers on their desks seemed to have been disturbed, but no sensitive documents were compromised.Last June, POGO reported that the Pentagon Inspector General’s office was “sitting on” a report that former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta “had disclosed ‘top-secret’ information and other sensitive details” relating to the assassination of Osama Bin Laden at an event attended by a producer of the movie Zero Dark Thirty. The IG draft also referenced an interview that the Defense Department’s chief of intelligence, Michael Vickers, gave to Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter Mark Boal. When the IG report was published, Panetta’s name was omitted, POGO subsequently reported, as was Vickers’s, and neither was subjected to further investigation—a sharp departure from the Obama Administration’s practice of vigorously pursuing leaks by lesser-ranking officials and dissidents.
The Pentagon did, however, open a so-called “insider threat” investigation into who leaked the IG draft—which was unclassified—to Adam Zagorin, a former Time magazine reporter who is a POGO journalist-in-residence. “Our work touches upon a lot of sensitive areas in federal government operations — from Wall Street cronyism to military corruption,” said POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian. “We have a 30-year history of going after the ‘bad guys’ and protecting our sources, so we’re not going to let something like this stop us.”
POGO is the second national security whistleblowers group to encounter suspicious activity.
Three years ago, in another heretofore unreported incident, burglars broke into the Washington offices of the Government Accountability Project, which offers legal support to whistleblowers—including, since last summer, NSA leaker Edward Snowden. In the Jan. 6, 2011 incident, the burglars seemed interested in just a few of the computers among the dozen or so in the office. Of the six stolen, two belonged to GAP’s national security attorneys, and one to its legal director, according to GAP President Louis Clark. No culprits have been arrested.
It sounds like amateur hour. But then you never know. Sometimes even the most powerful people on earth have been known to order a third rate burglary ….
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