Still doesn’t justify the leak and still doesn’t make Novak look any more like a responsible journalist.

Yeah, Huck’s right, but it still is to be determined whether it was common knowlege or a leak and whether Novak had “privilaged” information he should have kept to himself. I’m guessing the fault lies with Novak, I doubt there was any intent to out Plame by anyone in the Admin. I wouldn’t be suprised if it was Dems with loose lips either, but we’ll never know if that’s the case. I also doubt that her cover was imporant or even intact, but she and the gov should control the flow of that info.

It would be nice to know what happened, but an investigation will only give us a scapegoat.

Jimmy, you’re an expert at misreading the thrust of a post. Must be that bayou air or something. The point of this post is that Plame herself may be responsible for half of Washington knowing that she was in the CIA. Novak’s columns on the subject, which started and then advanced this story, indicate that it wasn’t exactly a deeply kept state secret that she was the wife of a guy that a) was a public figure and b) appears in Who’s Who in America, and that she was in the CIA.

Having said all that, of course if there actually was a leak—and I’m not at all convinced that there was—there’s no excuse for it. The leaker, should they ever be found and if there even was one, deserves firing and possibly prosecution. That’s the difference between our side and yours, fwiw—we don’t condone lawbreaking in the White House, by the President or anyone else. You guys think having a criminal run the country is just fine as long as he’s from your side of the political aisle. But you folks should really lay off the champaign celebrations for now. Yes, you’ve managed a kind of political kristalnact this week, bashing Bush, Arnold and Rush to the point of drawing blood on all three. But your party still has absolutely no answer for the present terrorist menace, and no ability to get beyond racial and economic balkinzation as your electoral strategy. Your party is hard on traditional Christians but soft on terrorism, and most people still understand that. And supposing by some evil miracle you actually manage to wreck the Bush administration with this thing, all you’ve managed to do is make it far more likely that we’ll lose the war.

The whole story is just bizarre. Everyone in the media clearly knows who leaked; many of them have stated openly that they also received the leak. Yet they continue discussing the matter in the third person, as if it’s a total mystery that needs full investigation. They make as much sense as OJ searching for the “real killer”, and they are all — including Fox News — guilty of passive disloyalty by letting the investigation roll on.

Bryan - I understood the thrust of your post and didn’t misread it at all. To explain my point further: Plame’s identity might not have been a deeply kept state secret; but I certainly didn’t know anything about her until Novak published his now infamous column. I doubt you did either. But all this is beside the point. The administration sources should not have discussed this information with Novak. Let me give a religious analogy: Just because a criminal confesses his crime to a priest in the confessional, and then turns himself in to the authorities and admits to his crime publicly, this doesn’t mean the priest then has the right to discuss what transpired in the confessional. The public admission does not free the priest to violate the sanctity of the confessional, much like the public knowledge of Plame’s identity does not free the administration official of respecting the protocol of not revealing a person’s identity which should be kept confidential.

Also, Novak was asked by the CIA not to publish her name, but he irresponsibly did anyway.

I’m not celebrating these events. I think they’re tragic. I lament the destructive nature of our political culture these days. I lament the fact that truly great people stay out of politics because of how nasty it has become. And I’m not so naive to think that “my side” is the beacon of ethical political behavior. But I also know that seedy politics and blood-letting tactics run on both sides of the ideological divide. I take no joy in this. I’d much rather argue issues from our different ideological points of view than celebrate (or despair over) scandals that give one side an ephemeral advantage over the other. And I’d love nothing more than to see some greater civility and respect in political discourse. I’m not a rabid radical. I’m just a person with a wife, two kids, a mortgage, a decent job, a strong faith, and a pretty mundane life, who happens to feel strongly about certain things and who enjoys the process of debate. But, I’m not a cheap gloater (though I do like to playfully throw in a good barb every now and then when I think I’ve got the upper hand in an argument). And I’m actually disappointed that you would defensively think otherwise.

Mr. Huck;

Rather than analogizing the information to a priestly confession, you can think of it as an NDA - non-disclosure agreement. Under the very standard terms of such things, I am released from its constraints if I obtain the information through other means. So if Bryan is working on some new video technique and tells me about it under an NDA, I’m forbidden to discuss it. If Bryan then publishes it in his weblog, I am released from the NDA. This is because I’m no longer passing on “inside” information that I have because of a priviledged relationship, but something I read in a weblog. In this analogy, if Plame herself spread that information around and it was known to the “leaker” independently of his access to classified data, then he’s just repeating something he heard at a cocktail party, not leaking classified data.

I’m not sure I agree with that view, but I certainly think it makes more sense than yours (because CIA related confidentiality agreements are much more similar to an NDA than a hearing a confession).

Mr. Carroll - That is an interesting point, and perhaps a better analogy. I don’t know what the legal confidentiality agreements are in the CIA regarding instances like the one being discussed. But, I will say that, even if the confidentiality agreements in the CIA are more akin to an NDA, they shouldn’t be, especially during wartime and over an operative working on the WMD beat in the Middle East. If they aren’t sacrosanct like the priestly confessional, they should be. If what you say is true, then the leaker could get off on a legal technicality, but the nature of the conduct would still be unethical in my mind, regardless.

In my above post, I meant to say confidentiality agreements in the government regarding the CIA. As we know, the leaker in the administration was not in the CIA.

Mr. Huck;

Do we know that the leaker wasn’t in the CIA? A high ranking CIA staffer could easily be called a “senior Administration official”.

I don’t think that my analogy would be a “legal technicality” but in fact shows that while releasing such information is bad, there’s no point in closing the barn door after the horse is gone.

However, if you’d like a better counter argument, consider the case of someone pulling together publically available data to do something like mapping all of the key telecom cables in the US or an ordered list of the largest natural gas storage locations. While all of that is public, it’s still quite questionable to gather and publicize it.

Personally, I don’t have a strong opinion on this matter yet. There are still far too many unknowns, and, as my two analogies show, I am not clear myself on the ethical status of the revelations. I will say that the journalists who know some of these answers and won’t contribute that information are becoming, IMHO, key villians of the piece.