Dan Eggen reports on the Bush administration’s latest panicked efforts to stave off their destruction. Going hand in hand with Bill Frist’s desperate effort to stop a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of the NSA wiretaps, the administration:

seeking to limit leaks of classified information, has launched initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources. The efforts include several FBI probes, a polygraph investigation inside the CIA and a warning from the Justice Department that reporters could be prosecuted under espionage laws.

In recent weeks, dozens of employees at the CIA, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies have been interviewed by agents from the FBI’s Washington field office, who are investigating possible leaks that led to reports about secret CIA prisons and the NSA’s warrantless domestic surveillance program, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with the two cases.

Every week, it seems, new revelations come out about how the Bush administration has tortured someone, or disappeared someone to a eastern European gulag, or pissed on someone’s Koran, or infiltrated some Quaker peace group, or authorized some illegal wiretapping. We continue to learn how the intelligence agencies were bullied, fed bad information by Cheney and company, tasked to solve the wrong problems…and how their advice went largely ignored…and then they were blamed for producing a flawed product.

The intelligence agencies have been fighting back, and the leaks have taken a steady toll on the Bush administration’s credibility.

“Almost every administration has kind of come in saying they want an open administration, and then getting bad press and fuming about leaks,” said David Greenberg, a Rutgers University journalism professor and author of “Nixon’s Shadow.” “But it’s a pretty fair statement to say you haven’t seen this kind of crackdown on leaks since the Nixon administration.”

The Nixon crackdown came from a select group of idiots commonly known as The Plumbers.

The Plumbers came to include several Watergate figures. E. Howard Hunt was recommended by (Tex) Colson and G. Gordon Liddy was recommended by (Egil) Krogh. Liddy coined his own sensitivity indicator for the group in the form of “ODESSA” for “Organization Directed to Eliminate the Subversion of the Secrets of the Administration”.4 The name reflects Liddy’s admiration for German-style intelligence operations as ODESSA was also the name of a Nazi fugitive network.

The new ODESSA program has the same goals. The Bush administration wants to stop any congressional investigation into the NSA case and the secret prisons because they know their actions are illegal and cannot stand up to public scrutiny. They also want to stop the leaking that is causing congressional curiosity in the first place. And if that means intimidating journalists, the Bush administration is willing to appeal to anachronistic and highly controversial laws, like the 1917 Espionage Act.

We are witnessing a massive cover-up. The Bush administration threatens journalists, launches a witchhunt within the intelligence community, and when Pat Roberts can’t control his intelligence committee, they have Bill Frist threaten to change the rules to prevent a hearing.

These are desperation tactics.