The leaders of the U.S. House and Senate intelligence committees last week roused themselves to complain about "the continued leaks regarding sensitive intelligence programs and activities, including specific details of sources and methods."

The leaders, two from each party, promised to include anti-leak measures in new spending bills and to press the Obama administration to track down the source of the information.

In part, the leaders may have been reacting to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who on Wednesday charged that leaks were coming from "the highest levels" of the White House for political reasons. The leaks "have the effect of making the president look strong and decisive on national security in the middle of his reelection campaign," said McCain, who called for an investigation by a special prosecutor.

Three points about that: One, President Barack Obama has been strong and decisive on national security, if not always correct or forthright. Two, he has not been shy about taking credit for it. And three, some people might have leaked for political reasons, but others may have just been bragging — infiltrating an al-Qaida bomb-making operation was pretty slick.

Whether these disclosures have damaged U.S. intelligence operations is speculative at best. The record of the past three years suggests that in matters of national security, Obama keeps too many secrets, not too few.

One major reason for the stop-leak memo was the publication Tuesday of "Confront and Conceal" by David Sanger of The New York Times. This is one of those inside-the-corridors-of-power books, a genre pioneered by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. Good reporters get insiders to open up, usually with the tacit permission of their bosses, who generally come off looking wise.

In a chapter called "Olympic Games," Sanger reveals details of an extraordinarily successful U.S.-Israeli operation that developed a computer "worm" and implanted it inside the machines that controlled Iran's nuclear centrifuges. The operation began during the Bush administration and continued until mid-2010. The so-called "Stuxnet" worm caused the centrifuges to spin wildly out of control and self-destruct.

Somehow agents managed to get Iranian workers to pick up worm-infected thumb drives and plug them in. No need to "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" to slow down Iran's nuclear program, as McCain once advocated. One source told Sanger, "It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn't think much about the thumb drive in their hand."

The week before Mr. Sanger's book was published, The Times published an in-depth article about the Obama administration's drone warfare against al-Qaida in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. This article, too, was full of inside stuff, portraying the president as calm, deliberate and determined to call the shots on when, where and on whom drone attacks would be unleashed.

"Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets," Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., told The Times. "They are not going to advertise that, but that's what they're doing."

Here's a Republican making the president "look strong and decisive on national security in the middle of his reelection campaign."

Chambliss, his party's ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was one of the leaders who signed the stop-leak memo. If the intelligence committees want do something useful, they'll step up oversight of drone and cyber warfare.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH