DANA PRIEST: What’s the frequency, Kenneth?

Let's see. Where the heck were we before United 93 and Zacarias Moussaoui and the reader queries interrupted?

Oh, yeah. Dana "Judas" Priest. And why she isn't made to answer for herself under oath in a federal courtroom.

The way we see it, Ms. Judas has done grievous harm to the national security of the United States. Which by rights should qualify her for a room down the hall from Mr. Moussaoui in the Super Max, at the least. We are talking capital crime here, after all.

The elite mediocracy has become, in effect, our domestic al Qaeda, sleeper cells of agents who are different from enemy combatants only in that the seditious services they provide the enemy are fully voluntary, rather than paid or conscripted.

Please don't give us any stuff about the duties of professional journalism. Professional journalists are expected, at a bare minimum, to report real facts. These alleged terrorist prisons in Eastern Europe appear to be sheer paranoid fantasy. We've seen at least one account of foreign intelligence officials saying of course, there's cooperation among the civilized nations in the apprehension of terrorists. And, of course, prisoner transfers necessarily involve short-term stays in temporary holding cells. What else would you expect?

But to turn this into secret prison facilities run by evil puppets of the Bush regime is pole-vaulting to conclusions in a fashion that belongs in the supermarket checkout line—you know, along with those publications with headlines like "Elvis Statue Found on Mars" and "Aliens Impregnated My Dog."

We considered spending some bandwidth on all of Ms. Judas' leftist connections. But that would be reinventing the wheel and going back over plowed ground. Suffice it to say that Ms. Judas' interests appear to go far beyond journalistic. So, for her to hide behind journalistic privilege is the height of hypocrisy.

In a nutshell, these connections involve her husband, William Goodfellow, who is executive director of a leftist outfit called the Center for International Policy, and fired CIA official Mary McCarthy, Ms. Judas' deep-throat source and a former aide to Clinton national security henchman Sandy Burglar. A little bit of Googling, and you can get a pretty good picture. Rush Limbaugh's staff has dug a lot of it up. Another great source is Jennifer Verner's article, "America's Red Army," published by FrontPageMagazine.com almost two years ago.

It appears that Mary McCarthy was a central player in the CIA's anti-Bush cell. We'd like to see a lot more investigation. It's intriguing, for example, what light Sandy Burglar's purloined documents might shed on the subject. Can you imagine what kind of mediocracy hysterics there would have been if a Bush operative had done something like that—and got off as lightly? There'd be no end to the shrieks and wails.

Anyway, there's one heck of a story here, if somebody would just put it together. Heck, someone could even win a Pulitzer—if they ever gave those for honest journalism, rather than propa-freaking-granda.