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how many detainees did valerie torture to death, mr. birther?
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...712840406.html
There is nothing more important than protecting the iden ies of CIA officers. So I need everybody to be clear: We will protect your iden ies and your security as you vigorously pursue your missions.
—Barack Obama at CIA headquarters, April 2009.
Once upon a time, Valerie Plame Wilson was a hero to liberals everywhere, a covert CIA operative whose cover was blown by a vindictive Bush administration out to ruin its critics. Today, liberals within government and without are betraying covert CIA operatives as if it were the very essence of virtue. Consistency, principled or foolish, has never been a hobgoblin of the liberal mind.
Consider Attorney General Eric Holder's decision Monday to investigate and potentially prosecute about a dozen previously closed cases involving alleged detainee abuse by CIA officers or contractors. Whether those agents and contractors are innocent or guilty—or whether they were simply working within parameters they believed were necessary and permissible, and cir stances they deemed urgent, but which the Obama administration has retroactively decided were not—are matters that will be determined in due course. The 2004 CIA report on which Mr. Holder based his decision says that the most damaging allegations are "too ambiguous to reach any authoritative determination regarding the facts."
What's nearly certain, however, is that the names of the agents will soon become a part of the public record, either directly or through leaks that the liberal press will have no scruple about printing. Last year, for instance, the New York Times published the name of a CIA officer who interrogated 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This was despite the protests of the officer and the CIA that to identify him would "put him at risk of retaliation from terrorists or harassment from critics of the agency," as the Times put it in an editor's note.
So much, then, for President Obama's solemn promises to the CIA troops. Nor is Mr. Holder's decision the only political missile tracing a course toward Langley.
On Friday, the Washington Post reported that the Justice Department is looking into allegations that military defense attorneys for top al Qaeda detainees had shown their clients photographs of CIA officers and contractors.
The pictures, some of which were "taken surrep iously outside [the CIA officers'] homes," were gathered by an outfit called the John Adams Project, jointly sponsored by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The Project seeks to identify the interrogators to serve as witnesses if and when their clients are tried in federal court or by military commissions. "We are confident that no laws or regulations have been broken," ACLU executive director Anthony Romero told the Post.
He's got to be kidding. The Intelligence Iden ies Protection Act of 1982, the law endlessly invoked in Mrs. Wilson's case, specifically proscribes anyone "in the course of a pattern of activities" from seeking to expose the iden y of covert agents "to any individual not authorized to receive classified information." Equally plain is the penalty: "fined under le 18, United States Code, or imprisoned not more than three years, or both."
The Act was written in response to the public disclosure of the names of U.S. covert agents, at least one of whom, Athens station chief Richard Welch, was assassinated in 1975 by Greek terrorists. It was approved overwhelmingly in Congress. In a 2006 letter to this newspaper, Sen. John Kerry approvingly quoted former president George H.W. Bush's "admonition that those who expose our agents are 'the most insidious of traitors.'"
Mr. Kerry was objecting to an editorial warning that CIA officers would soon have to take out personal insurance against the risk of lawsuits and congressional subpoenas. But those officers will have considerably more to fear if the detainees they once interrogated learn their names and are able to get the word out to their associates (as the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdul Rahman was able to get messages out of federal prison through his lawyer Lynn Stewart), assuming they don't get out themselves. In that case, more CIA agents will be gunned down in their homes—and the John Adamses of our day will have given demonstrably material support to terrorists.
Liberals have never liked the CIA, except when it suited their partisan purposes. That's fine: There's much not to like about the agency, and the U.S. might well be better off without its bungled operations and laughable intelligence estimates. But having shouted themselves hoarse over Mrs. Wilson, their enthusiasm for this new round of outing is a bit unseemly. Especially when lives are actually at stake. Especially when a liberal president has pledged to protect those lives.
how many detainees did valerie torture to death, mr. birther?
So her life was probably never in jeopardy. What's your point?
my point is that people bring up plame and completely dismiss the point that outing her for telling the truth was an act of revenge. it's also an act of treason.
Has anyone here ever taken in a house guest only to find their private lives soon turn into chaos because that person now knows too much information about what resides in your own home?
On a much grander scale....this is what would happen if the secrecy of U.S. agents is exposed to our enemies.
How many did these people? As far as I can tell, no deaths by torture have been attributed by CIA personnel (a few have been attributed to Navy Seals).
It's a faulty argument anyway. If it's wrong to release the names of one operative, it's wrong to release any of them. If the did wrong, punish them internally if you can, otherwise fire them and incarcerate them. You don't release information on them while they are at large, though.
Treason? Are you kidding me?
What happened to her was perfectly legal. Wrong, perhaps, but legal.
I agree with this, for the most part. If there's no possible way to keep their name secret (ie they've broken a law and their name has to be released for some reason), then do such. However, all pains should be taken to keep names anonymous if possible.
That's classified.
i saw a guy give a speech to cia personnel at the cia headquarters.
he said outing an agent is an act of treason. you know what treason is, right?
I don't think you know what it is.
i know what it is. would you like to change it's definition for the traitors you still support?
The only crime defined in the cons ution.
So what did Armitage have against Plame?
LOL... No Kidding...
Clam, don't you have a couple of these on you keyboard?
Dumbass . . . I'm going to make this real simple for you.
Patrick Fitzgerald concluded early in his investigation that no one had broken the law in the leaking Plame's iden y. Treason is against the law.
If you disagree with Fitzgerald, please explain, in detail, how anyone committed treason in the Plame Affair. The burden is on you.
he envied her hair.
fitzgeralds conclusion........there's a ing surprise, huh einstein?
So that's why he leaked her name? Why wasn't he prosecuted?
there was going to have to be a fall guy, no matter how they tried to spin it.
but, they picked the right people to help them dodge the act of treason.
i guess they thought scooter was nothing more than on their shoe.
Fitzgerald did acknowledge that outing her put her in danger. Putting an uncer cover CIA operative is bad, don't you agree?
doob is on a leash.
Admit it, you're a dumbass.
Fitzgerald clearly stated that he couldn't verify the intent of the release so there was no way he could charge anyone. His example was perfect: If a picther hits a batter how do you know if it was on purpose? The only way to find that out is if the picther admits it.
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