Many of our members on the left were justifiably concerned with the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity to the press for what looked liked political purposes.
The fact that Valerie Plame was not undercover or operating out of the country, or otherwise engaged so that the leak would damage our security as a Nation was hardly the point. It was against the law to leak her name, and the precedent endangers other covert operatives.
In this situation where no actual damage was done there were cries for the heads of those responsible and a lengthy investigation has ensued for over a year.
We have just had a similar situation occur. A secret Government program initiated by the President with oversight from Congress was leaked to the press. The leaking of this program does compromise our National security directly.
Whether or not you agree with this program or feel it was appropriate is moot. It was a National Security secret and it was unlawful to leak it.
Because it was leaked terrorists planning an attack now know that they must take steps to circumvent this monitoring. The valuable flow of information that we can recieve is no longer available.
Surely you must agree that we must pursue this unlawful leak which has compromised our National security with equal if not greater zeal than we pursued the Plame leak.
The people that did this may have cost our country the lives of its citizens. They knowingly broke the law and hurt our Nation. They should go to jail for the rest of their lives.
That this is so is a seperate issue from what you think of the program.
This is an untruth. She was engaged in her duties at the time of her disclosure.
The leaking of this information served the purpose of informing the public of an ongoing crime of enormous magnitude.
However, it did nothing to harm our national security.
Absolute nonsense. Complete partisan balderdash. Without Bush spying on Americans, terrorists would still have known that they would have been vulnerable to warranted, lawful wiretapping at any time under existing FISA regulations.
Explain to me why anything would have changed from the perspective of a terrorist that would change his behavior between FISA and BUSH.
Further nonsense. You are simply ignorant of the issues.
First off, do you have any cite showing that the NYTimes story broke any law? Irrespective of the first question a President committing crimes and willfully disregarding law is a much greater threat than potentially some terrorists knowing that their phone calls might be tapped. Any equivilence to exposing a CIA agent for a simple political score is quite simply daffy.
Please read more carefully. I did not say that she was not engaged in her duties, I said she was not engaged so that the “leak would damage our security as a Nation.”
Please do not seek to claim that I am speaking untruthfully by altering my statement to suit your whim
If you maintain that this program was a crime of enormous magnitude would you expect Rockeffelar and all the Senators and Congressman who were informed of it to be prosecuted for conspiracy for their participation?
Is one allowed to pick and choose which laws one should follow? Can I break one law if it exposes another crime?
I guess you’re right. The ability to listen in on your enemy’s planning of attacks so that you can intercept and prevent them really isn’t a National Security issue. I mean it wouldn’t have done us any good to have known what Al Quaeda was planning for September 11th.
Well yes. And if they were intelligent they would have acted in a way to avoid such wiretapping seeing as they could find out how it worked. Seeing as they didn’t know how this program worked they couldn’t plan to avoid it now, could they?
Fred the terrorist knows that he better not receive phone calls with operational instructions at his home phone because it might be subject to a legal wiretap. So, he arranges to receive his phone calls from new and different phones that he has not used before that are unlikely to have a wiretap. Fred thinks he’s safe, but because these phone calls all originate from the same phone overseas he is actually being tapped. Now Fred knows that the person making the call is no longer secure from wiretapping, so that end of the call is now randomized leaving us with no way to trace it. Secure that he is now operating beneath the radar, Fred the terrorist blows up a school and kills a bunch of kids. He thanks the leaker for allowing him the opportunity to do so.
Perhaps you’re right. I am ignorant of how leaking classified information that is specifically prohibited under law from being leaked is legal. I await enlightenment.
I’m referring to the person who leaked it to the Times.
If the President was committing crimes why did the NYT sit on the story for a year? Why did he inform the appropriate members of Congress including the Democrats of what he was doing?
It seems to me that if I was committing a crime I would be hiding it from oversight rather than subjecting it to oversight, doesn’t it?
Fine, do you have a cite showing that this person broke the law?
Apparently they were convinced by the administration to hold off on reporting the story on the basis of jeopardizing current investigations. A regrettable error by whomever made that decision at the NYT but I don’t see why thats relevent.
There appears to be much dispute about who knew what when in Congress. Regardless, merely informing a few Congress members does not give him liscense to break the law.
It doesn’t appear that the administration went to congress for approval rather they told them what they were going to do. How complete these briefings were remain to be seen but I doubt they were as complete as the administration is contending.
The court that Bush would have gone to for permission for these wiretaps has denied what…4? out of thousands. And there are levels of appeals after that.
First off, the program’s appropriateness is not under debate as much as its constitutionality and legality. Right now it looks like the program itself is unlawful, and if that’s the case, the legality of its leak will be what is moot.
Assuming that your assertion is correct (I too would like a cite, I couldn’t find anything in my quick search), I think you’re correct that the leaker should be prosecuted. While the “but he was doing something illegal” argument is tempting, I’m not persuaded that it should carry the day. If leaking that information was illegal, as you assert, I would have no problem with an investigation to determine what actually occurred and who leaked the information. There would certainly be a good argument at sentencing that the leaking was done to uncover misconduct that would otherwise go unknown, but I do think we should get to the bottom of the leak. Of course, there is little to no information about the facts of the case, so it’s almost impossible to debate the issue.
But you are speaking untruthfully. She had been overseas, and she had overseas operations that were compromised: no doubt putting most of the people she had worked with in danger. We can’t know the extent of the harm because it’s all still classified, but there is no reason to think that the leak did not aid Americas’ enemies in gathering information about its covert operations.
Actually, this line of argument seems laughable. The only new information about our operations that anyone gained via the leak was legal and proceedural (which isn’t particularly helpful to our enemies). It’s not covert or secret that the US can listen into foriegn communications (or even domestic ones!) via wiretapping. The leak revealed that the way in which the wiretapping was done apparently violated the law by bypassing established proceedures: rather bizarrely seemingly without need since previous intelligence failures seem to have not involved problems with obtaining warrants, but rather information sharing and prioritizing of information.
Your story about Fred makes no sense whatsoever: what in the current law prevents the government from wiretapping in any of the configurations Fred tries to evade them? That’s the whole purpose of having a court instead of a robot: the court will authorize measures and issue warrants that make sense.
I strongly agree. Regardless of the moral rightness or wrongness of the leak, the violation of the law and the precedent demand that we not allow random people to decide what parts of our covert operations remain secret and which don’t.
That isn’t the punishment for breaking this particular law, either in this case or the Plame case, and, as usual, you probably know this already.
Looks like the FISA court is a little problematic given the President’s new claims. If he can just bypass them, why do they exist? Seems like a giant waste of everyone’s time, not to mention tainting all the previous warrants. Totaly harmless, folks!
With all due respect, this is asine and frankly far below the level of debate that you usually offer.
Terrorists know there’s all sorts of spook stuff looking for them. Leaking this is hardly news to an organization that cut it’s teeth among some pretty hardline police states such as Saudi Arabia.
Then Fred sat down at the table to get into a heated discussion with his wife about the perils of universal healthcare.
Of course, apart from being an evil bastard, Fred was an ignorant fuck as well. He didn’t know what was public knowledge to everyone else in the terrorist union. Under FISA, all calls to and from an identified person could be tapped at any time under legal means. This could have been done even if a warrant had not yet been obtained, as long as one was sought within 72 hours. While Fred was gloating about being so thankful to the leaker of information, his wife rolled her eyes and knew that he would never get promoted to management because he just knew jack shit about his business.
Of course, none of this prevented right wingnuts from seizing on Fred’s story and making him the poster child for subversion of civil liberties while in the thrall of a “please protect me at all costs, Daddy-state” mentality. You see, facts and truth never matter much to the emotionally-driven rationality-devoid right wing of the Divided States of Hypothetica.
It seems to me that the major difference between the two is that the Plame case had no justification (that I’m aware of) other than political revenge. The wiretapping, on the other hand, is a case of whistleblowing – the law was (and, as a nod to Bricker, I’ll put this in here – potentially) being broken. If there is another law that makes dispersing knowledge (or suspicion) of a crime actually illegal, how does one decide which takes precedence?
IMO, a law that makes exposure of other illegal activity illegal itself is bad law and should be suspended.
You believe that uncovering potentially illegal Executive branch activity threatens our country. I believe that potentially illegal Executive branch activity threatens our country even more. I also believe that invading a hostile country under trumped up pretenses, secret prisons, and torture foment terrorism and allow hatred of our country to gain a toehold in the disaffected and easily impressionable in many regions of the world. We have legitmized, to some degree, al Zarqawi. He was nothing before the war in Iraq – now to some he is probably a folk hero to those influenced by radical Wahabi Islam. The same Islam that Bush’s pals in Saudi Arabia push out to all parts of the world via the money we spend on their oil.
Net, if a law was broken then the person who broke it should be sought and punished accordingly. But Bush has shown that he’s a much greater threat to our country than someone who blew the whistle on his shennanigans.
In a time or war, some fool told the world the Plame was a CIA agent. Every person who met with Plame over the past couple of years, people all over the world are now suspected of cooperating with the CIA. Some of them may have already been arrested, perhaps tortured or killed.
In addition, everyone who travelled with Plame while she was under the cover of Universal Imports (or whatever) are now suspected (probably rightly) of being CIA. Everyone they met with is now suspected by every decent security service in the world.
Whoever reveled her CIA connection has place a huge number of people around the world at risk. Further, people will be less likely to cooperate with our undercover people knowing that the Veep or his staff will turn them over to their nation’s security services in order to make a political point.
Whoever did this need to be jailed for a very long time. That will not happen of course. We need to save prison space for people who grow pot at home. :rolleyes:
Yes, all leaks should be investigated. Someone who leaks something “good” one day might leak something “bad” the next. There’s no way of telling.
But the similarities of the NSA case and the Plame case do not speak to the main difference: The Plame leak was undeniably made in order to further a smear campaign against a political opponent, not to inform the public of a fact relative to their liberties or security. I simply fail to see how the American people are served by knowing the name of a covert CIA agent. It is a matter of curiousity, to be sure, but I just fail to see any connection whatsoever between this bit classified trivia and the general public interest.
On the other hand, the revelation that the military is engaged in domestic spy missions cannot have a clearer link to the public interest. One can debate the merits of the spy missions, but one would have to be completely dense not to understand that the public has a legitimate interest in gaining an understanding of the ways in which our government balances the need for security with the need to respect the civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. This is a big, important Constitutional issue.
That is the fundamental difference between the leaks; and that is why I believe the first was a bad leak, and the second is a good leak.
Is the Justice department investigating the Times story? Bush sort of implied there they were, but it’d be nice to see some independent verification of that.