Karl Rove, the CIA, and Liberal Hypocrisy

Why are liberals suddenly so interested in defending the CIA and its secrets? Driving home from work the other night I was listening to the Randi Rhodes Show on Air America, and Rhodes was going back and forth with a caller about a supposed Bush administration conspiracy to undermine the CIA, and Karl Rove's horrific crime in outing a CIA agent and the company she worked for.   When I got home, I went to Air America's website, where I found a petition calling for President Bush to fire Rove because he "leaked a CIA agent's identity - undermining the war on terror and endangering one of America's secret soldiers."

Now I'm no fan of Karl Rove, and I definitely think Karl Rove had all the wrong motivations for outing Valerie Plame . . .  but aren't these "secret soldiers" we're talking about the same ones who employed Luis Posada Carilles and trained the torturers in Guatemala?  And aren't these front companies the same ones that smuggled heroin in the '60's and '70's, ran guns to the Contras in the '80's, and now take detainees to places like Syria and Egypt to be tortured?

An article in the current issue of Time magazine explains the law Rove is accused of violating -- the Intelligence Identitites Protection Act.  According to Time's Josh Tyrangiel, the law basicly makes it illegal for a government official to "intentionally exposes an operative, knowing that the U.S. 'is taking affirmative measures to conceal' the operative's identity," or for anyone who repeatedly exposes covert operatives "knowing that the U.S. is protecting their identities and having 'reason to believe' their exposure will damage U.S. intelligence "

The law was passed in 1982 as a delayed reaction to former CIA agent Philip Agee's 1975 memoir, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, in which he revealed the names and activities of a number of other CIA operatives.   The passage of the law of course coincided with the peak of an extremely bloody period of CIA orchestrated terror in Latin America.

So why are liberals suddenly invoking the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and making broad proclimations about the importance of defending the sanctity of the CIA's secrets?  Part of it is certainly partisan opportunism.  But I think there is another force at work here too.  A substantial segement of the Democratic Party leadership, led by John Kerry, has deeply embedded itself with disgruntled military, intelligence, and State Department proffessionals like Rand Beers, Joe Wilson, and Richard Clarke.  This moteley crew of petty war criminals (Beers headed up the crop fumigation program in Colombia, Clarke was involved in whitewashing the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan in the Clinton years,) is disenchanted with the war in Iraq and upset that the neo-conservatives have taken over the State Department and the Pentagon and displaced the old foreign policy establishment.  The CIA is one of the few "national security" agencies where the neo-cons haven't taken hold, and has been involved in a prolonged turf war with the Bushies.  Much of the leadership of the Democratic Party is interested in putting the old foreign policy establishment back in place -- going back to the good old days when the U.S. starved Iraqis to death instead of occupying their country and there was plenty of military aid available to keep right wing regimes in power in Latin America.  (During the campaign Kerry bemoaned the fact that Bush was unable to protect the governmments of Bolivia and Argentina from popular insurrections.)

Faced with this kind of struggle between two evils, I'm tempted to follow the advice the late Justice Thurgood Marshall was rumored to have given his law clerks -- when one fat cat fights another fat cat, say that you have no jurisdiction. But on second thought, given the legal principles at stake, I think that we Authentic Journalists will have to hold our noses and back Karl Rove if he says that the Intelligence Identities Protection Act violates his First Amendment rights, and back Judith Miller, in her refusal to disclose who did or did not discuss the identity of CIA agents with her -- even if the sources she is protecting are the same lying bastards whose claims she uncritically parrotted in the pages of the New York Times during the lead up to the war in Iraq.