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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: wonk who wrote (4678)	10/27/2005 1:30:16 AM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541658

Nice to get a reasoned response instead of a rant. I certainly agree that there are both legal and policy issues at play. Even if there were no statutes prohibiting disclosure of a covert operative's identity, simple good form and decency not to mention the need to protect sources and the operative's safety would require that a covert identity not be intentionally blown. That is the simple part. The tough part comes when the covert operative identity's already been blown, as may well have been the case here, or where there is no longer any need to protect the covert identity, which also seems to have possibly been the case here. Under those circumstances, you run into some thorny First Amendment issues and their always complex interaction with national security interests. I don't even try to come up with a good legal or policy framework to try to think about those issues since I think each situation is sui generis. It isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination to find a good way to look at these issues, and where you land on them generally says more about who you are and what you believe than anything else. My view, for what it's worth, is that each case has to be looked at individually. I have a hard time believing that Plame was still covert or that she had not been covert for such a short period of time that disclosure was dangerous to her and others. We'll obviously never know that bit of information as a fact. And there is always the possibility that hidden games are being played. Since you read the SSIC Report, I am sure you were just as astonished at the level of incompetence on the part of the CIA as I was. The incompetence was so all-encompassing that it seemed almost laughable, so much so that my thoughts were that so many allegedly smart people cannot be so dense without actually trying to accomplish some purpose with their incompetence. On the other hand, you also read the Duelfur Report so you know all about Saddam's attempt to not have physical WMD on hand while still retaining the intellectual capital necessary to kick start a program on short notice, all while suggesting/bluffing for Iran's benefit that he indeed did have them. These facts to some extent absolve the CIA and everyone else who failed to find the truth about his WMD, so who knows where the genesis and the truth of this sordid affair lie. Incidentaly, the Duelfur Report leads me to conclude that Saddam was every bit as dangerous as the Administration suggested he was, but of course that particular aspect of things has not been exactly emphasized by the media, and it is outside the scope of our present discussion. But, damn, what a terrific report it is. It's thoroughness and insight is matched only by the failure of 99.99% of the world to know it even exists. Oh, well, what's new about rampant ignorance, huh? Long story short, I agree with you on the need to protect sources and covert operatives as a means of protecting nattional security interests. In the context of this specific matter, I'm not so sure those considerations apply. See? I can take my lawyer hat off. vbg. Unfortunately, the legal implications are the subject du jour in our overlawyered world, so that is what I was responding to in the first instance.