Sorry about the delay in responding to some of the points here; it's been a busy week.
There are lots of good people working for the CIA, but the CIA has also done lots of unethical things. Welcome to the complex world that is reality, where not everything is black and white.
Well, yes, I'm perfectly aware that the real world isn't particularly straightforward. I acknowledge that what the CIA does is a dirty job but somebody's got to do it, and I'm glad somebody is willing to. However, secretive organizations like the CIA need to be kept honest, and requires oversight, and even the occasional leak. Even if that leak is, technically, a violation of the Espionage Act (which is a pretty awful piece of legislation anyway, which is why much of it was repealed in 1921).
I don't know if you saw this, but
the Agency has now requested the DoJ to launch a criminal inquiry "to determine the source of
a Washington Post article that said the agency had set up a covert prison network in Eastern Europe and other countries to hold important terrorism suspects."
Now, if this story is true--and given the
WaPo's record, I'm inclined to think it is, especially also given the exemption granted the CIA from the prohibition on torture passed by the Senate some weeks ago--this is precisely the sort of leak needed to keep the Agency honest. And it illustrates perfectly that just because the CIA reckons something untoward occurred, that doesn't make it necessarily so; they might just as well be hacked off because someone made them look bad.
My point was that the same might well apply to the Plame leak as well, and so I'm rather incredulous towards arguments that the CIA's request for a criminal investigation into the Plame leak was necessarily motivated solely by a desire to see justice done. The Agency has repeatedly butted heads with the White House and the DoD under this administration, and I'm inclined to think this has more to do with why these arguments are being offered than with any actual trust in the Agency's moral integrity. It's "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" reasoning.
I think that also covers a number of counterpoints that
curi0us made, so I'll move on...
So you agree that your earlier post was incorrect and that claiming there was no crime if she wasn’t legally “covert” under the IIPA was be false?
I'd be willing to concede that I may have been incorrect that no violation of the law occurred in the event that Plame did not meet the definition of a "covert agent." However, I will stress that that does not invalidate a majority of my points. First, that even after two years of investigation, Fitzgerald still has yet to prove that a violation of either the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or the Espionage Act occurred. Second, it should be noted that the Espionage Act only recently received mention in this affair; for the two years previously, everyone was focused exclusively on the IIPA, blithely disregarding the question of whether a violation of the latter act actually occurred; evidently, it did not.
He does know the batter was struck!
Only if you accept the idea that the leaking of Plame's name was, in and of itself, analogous to the baseball bouncing off the batter's head. If we have to pursue that analogy, my objection is that Fitzgerald is unwilling (or unable) to point to actually the rulebook and say straight out, page and paragraph, which rule was actually broken. And, frankly, the analogy stinks to begin with because criminal law and baseball are two different things, and (again, as a former member of a prosecutions staff) I don't think much of a prosecutor who has to resort to baseball analogies (for Ed's sake!) to make his point.
