Kristof: Secrets of the Scandal ( Aldrich Ames outed Mrs. Wilson)

October 11, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/11/opinion/11KRIS.html
Secrets of the Scandal
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


Those operations remain secret, but there are several crucial facts that can be made public without putting anyone at risk — and together, they leave everybody looking bad. The C.I.A. is now conducting a damage assessment, which will determine what networks and operations it will have to close down. But my sense is that Democrats exaggerate the damage to Mrs. Wilson's career and to her personal security, while Republicans vastly play down the enormity of the security breach and the danger to the assets she worked with.


First, the C.I.A. suspected that Aldrich Ames had given Mrs. Wilson's name (along with those of other spies) to the Russians before his espionage arrest in 1994. So her undercover security was undermined at that time, and she was brought back to Washington for safety reasons.


C.I.A. veterans are seething, and rightly so, at the betrayal by their own government. Larry Johnson, who entered the agency at the same time as Mrs. Wilson, is a Republican who voted for President Bush — and he's so enraged that he compares the administration leaker to the spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.


We in journalism are also wrong, I think, to extend professional courtesy to Robert Novak, by looking beyond him to the leaker. True, he says he didn't think anyone would be endangered. Working abroad in ugly corners of the world, American journalists often learn the identities of American C.I.A. officers, but we never publish their names. I find Mr. Novak's decision to do so just as inexcusable as the decision of administration officials to leak it.

is still a fucking idiot media ho who tries to make his arguments non-partisan...hence his blast at the Dems... Him trying to roll the Dems into the "stink" crowd on this one is asinine!

Just another self-serving lie -- on the theory that if Ms. Plame had already been outed then the Bu$h administration isn't guilty of treason.

And note the use of the weasel-word "suspected" -- which means the Rethugs have no proof. Not even a claim by Ames or a defector that he'd outed her. Again, I'd bet money that it's all Rethug spin; i.e. lies.

And -- like Trumand -- I'm fed up with media "even handedness" which means that if Rethugs get caught in a CRIME, Democrats must be guilty of something. Because otherwise the Rethugs/BFEE would be seen as the criminal organization they are and voted out.

Vitruvius

P.S: Even this latest Rethug spin still leaves the Bu$h administration guilty of a crime. Even if the Russians knew (and I'd need more than Rethug spin to believe that), it is by no means clear they would share the information, thereby possibly endangering their source. When the Bu$h administration outed Ms. Plame to the whole wide world, they endangered every third-world source she had. I wonder how many are already dead.

Which is why the law does not recognize "somebody else blabbed first" as a defense.

Will they find the leakers? Probably not, but you know that they will do everything in their power to find the senior administration official( who apparently was so offended by efforts to discredit former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson ),that he or she exposed the White House's connection about the leak to The Post.

Loyalty is more important than treason.