So When will Dick Cheney be charged with Espionage? His Crime was the Same as Snowden’s

http://www.juancole.com/2013/06/charged-espionage-snowdens.html

So When will Dick Cheney be charged with Espionage? His Crime was the Same as Snowden’s
Posted on 06/22/2013 by Juan Cole

~snip~

The same theory under which Edward Snowden is guilty of espionage could easily be applied to former vice president Dick Cheney.

Cheney led an effort in 2003 to discredit former acting ambassador in Iraq, Joseph Wilson IV, who had written an op ed for the New York Times detailing his own mission to discover if Iraq was getting uranium from Niger. (The answer? No.)

Cheney appears to have been very upset with Wilson, and tohave wished to punish him by having staffers contact journalists and inform them that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was secretly a CIA operative. While Cheney wasn’t the one whose phone call revealed this information, he set in train the events whereby it became well known. (Because Cheney’s staff had Plame’s information sitting around in plain sight, Armitage discovered it and then was responsible for the leak, but he only scooped Libby and Rove, who had been trying to get someone in the press to run with the Plame story.

What Cheney did in ordering his aides Scooter Libby and Karl Rove to release the information about Plame’s identity was no different from Snowden’s decision to contact the press.