Very well argued.

As I said in another comment, if there is some way to criminalize the outing of good CIA agents like Plame while allowing for whistleblowing against the bad ones, then I'm all for it. Perhaps your critics think the days when the US government used the CIA to do bad things are all behind us. Seems unlikely to me, and just because the CIA is on the side of the angels this time is no reason to think that's going to be the case in some other situation.

5 years really isn't all that long to wait to expose an eeevil CIA agent, retired or not. It isn't a lifelong ban.

1. The deaths of CIA agents is not the ultimate measure of the damage that could be done. In addition to the impossible-to-quantify loss of national security (potentially the most important factor), the lives and freedoms of anyone who has worked with, or is suspected of working with, the CIA are also jeopardized.

2. "A little bit more concern about lack of OSHA safety enforcement and a bit less concern about CIA agent safety might be appropriate." This - and other "what about so-and-so?" arguments you've deployed - is totally disingenuous. Decriminalizing the outing of CIA agents will not save any miners, nor will it give anyone health care, nor will it cure AIDS, or do anything else that might be more important. Blogging about these things won't help, either.

3. Here's a scenario: a policeman is about to do something awful - commit a murder or something. This isn't a wild hypothetical - things like this happen with some frequency, and, if I wanted, I could make a list of such things which dwarfs your list of bad acts by the CIA. Perhaps many of these acts could hae been prevented if someone had killed, or assaulted, or incapacitated, or otherwise hindered, the offending policeman. Question: is this an argument for decriminalizing killing, attacking or slashing the tires of policemen? Or is my argument that, under extraordinary circumstances, these acts may be justifiable? And aren't these very different things?

4. It's still a policy problem. Outing CIA agents hinders the effectiveness of policy, good or ill. If the CIA does more bad than good, this is a net gain; if it does more good than bad, it's a net loss. If you believe the CIA does more harm than good, why not argue to abolish it? And either way, shouldn't the people who pay for bad policies be the elected and appointed officials who are actually responsible for the policy, rather than the people who are charged with carrying them out (and anyone else who is caught in the crossfire)?

I don't altogether disagree with Andrew Northrup's point. However, you are at least raising a question which too many people nominally on the left have ignored in the rush to stick it to the Republicans.

Um, right after saying the "average CIA agent lives a life of less danger than a postman" you link to a page about how just 70 or so agents have died in service of the CIA. Except on that page is this:

"Agents put themselves in hazard's way 24 hours a day. Their whole life was a risk," he adds. Many died in airplane crashes on night missions, either shot down or mishaps in landing. Others died in pipe bombings, in terrorists' attacks like the bombing of the Beirut embassy, or in prison."

Plus, read today's WaPo article outlining Plame's life. She was going on overseas missions every few weeks, and was trained in lots of extremely dangerous stuff.

There are many bastards in the CIA, but I don't see how making it a crime to reveal their status within 5 years of their last overseas mission really puts that much of a damper on bringing out the truth of their actions. It's not like this law makes it illegal to claim the CIA was involved in things, just revealing a specific agent's identity. I mean, this doesn't make it illegal to say the CIA was behind the coup in Venezuela.

What I think it comes down to, in my mind, is the acceptance of the necessary evil present by the existence of the CIA or something like it. It has seemed odd to me that so many on the left have come rushing to the aid of the CIA when in the past many have wished for its complete abolition ... but, to me, that does not decriminalize what was done by "outing" Plame. It simply confirms to me the old adage of politics making strange bedfellows.

Are Democrats and progressives making a stink out of this to stick it to the Bush Administration? Without a doubt, in my opinion. Again, the simple fact that the Dems are playing politics with the issue does not change the basic nature of the crime.

I think it must be accepted that something like the CIA *must* exist, if for no other reason than other nations, who may or may not wish us ill, have their own secretive intelligence agencies. That does not excuse nor condone past CIA behavior - indeed, the CIA's track record is spotty at best, abhorrent at worst, with the greatest misdeeds occurring in the 60s and 70s in the all-consuming war against Communism at any cost - it simply accepts that, sometimes, we need to keep secrets to keep a society free.

(A side note: this may seem a minor quibble, but it's not. Plame was not an "agent" of the CIA - she was an intelligence officer, or operative, whichever term you'd like to use. An "agent" is a human asset recruited by a CIA officer, usually in a position to gain information and pass it on to the officer (or operative, or even "handler", though not in the Joe Pantoliano sense of the word). Plame, as an intelligence officer, ran agents. She was not, herself, an agent.)

Basically, the Plame affair is both a criminal and political issue. For better or worse, the CIA is a tool of our foreign policy, a way to gather information about enemies of our nation. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, perfect, and has been wielded too often as an half-hidden hammer of the United States' foreign policy. But it is a necessary evil, and the exposing of a CIA operative - especially one using NOC, non-official cover - not only endangers the life of the CIA operative, but the agents she has recruited as part of her operation as well. *That's* why it's also a crime, and *that's* why whoever gave the information to Novak should be prosecuted.

Andrew Northrup's are right on. The death of an agent is of no more consequence than the death of soldier in combat, on a personal level. The immorality of exposing military opertions secrets has been dealt with eleewhere. What exposure endangers is the system: the means and ends of operations, the revelantion of which can give not only an enemy but even a friendly nation information to interfere with a policiy's intent.

CIA work-- intelligence work of any kind -- has little or no similarity to what we see in the movies or even what we read in LaCarre's novels. It IS tedious, often unfruitful work. It is RESEARCH which demands tight protocol control to produce accurate information.

The results of that research could mean life or death for millions in some cases; the loss or gain of millions of dollars in resources in others, the stability of a fledgling goverment or anarchic chaos in others.

We may never know what tragedies intelligence services have protected us from or, to the negative, their failures have exposed us to. To me, the exposure of criminal activity, partisan tom-foolery and immoral and unethical activity is an indication of the failures of our intelligence services. Many are unbelievably heinous calling for severe punishment of those invoilved. But, we must be careful NOT to expose the methods that work, that do protect us and other people.

Valarie Plame and Joseph Wilson are very intelligent, talented people and will have no probems finding other work. It is the people in the field who trusted her for protection I worry about. By "reverse engineering" her position within the intelligence community, another intelligence service can analyze and disable the dynamic function of what she spent 30 years building. Given the area she was working in--teh exposure of WMDs, that could have consequences for an ethinic group in Africa or a European nation or an American corporation.

It is the sheer stupidity of the person who "outed" her in not realizing the consequences which deserves severe sanctions; if it was done KNOWING the consequences, then the person(s) involved need to be removed from the human community through life imprisonment or execution.

To me they are treasonous and and high treason is the ONLY act I believe deserves the death penalty because of the potential consequences of the crime.

Given Robert Novak's history of being a conduit for information serving an ideology, there is no way I can be convinced he did not know the consequences of what he was doing. He is a venal nattering nabob, IMHO. He should not be protected by his status as a "journalist".

Dave Dix,
Minneapolis, MN

Though Andrew and I are sort of at each other's throats at the moment (I just apologized on his site), I grudgingly agree he's making a valid point--the harm done in revealing Plame's identity is more than just the risk to a few people's lives. (Probably the lives of her informants more than hers.) It's the harm done to her mission, which is tracking down WMD's, something that is actually a legitimate CIA activity.

But all the liberals and leftists who've been defending the sanctity of the CIA don't seem to realize this is going to be thrown back into our face next time someone "outs" a CIA agent doing something evil. Abolishing the CIA isn't an option, since we'd just have to re-establish a new one. We need the CIA, but sometimes we also need whistleblowers and it doesn't seem like the current law allows for that. Or that's my impression.

BTW, the idea that anyone in authority would ever pay for American crimes is probably wishful thinking. Nixon wasn't punished for killing Cambodians, Reagan wasn't punished for supporting various mass murderers in Latin America and Africa and lying about their murders, and one could go on down the usual list of American crimes and not find any high-ranking American who was actually punished for any of it. Only if Americans are hurt will it matter at the ballot box and one can forget the idea of war crimes trials, of course. The best we can hope for is that someone blows the whistle while the crime is in progress and that it somehow becomes a "scandal". Exposing it five years after someone retires is going to be a bit late to do much good.

Bravo.

The reason why the Philip Agee defense cannot work here: the White House is whence the orders for these sordid affairs come. For the White House to be blowing agents cover and to use this defense (which, mercifully, it has not), the Philip Agee defense, that the actions involved are so repulsive is the height of conceit.

When did Government Official change to "someone" If i teel someone who a CIA agent is and I have found out ... I have coimitted no crime ... especially if I am reporter.

Also, I think that a few years in jail for something you believe in is something many of the liberal leaders have done over the years.

In the end government officials should be held to that higher standard because if you can't trust your bosses as a undercover operative, then what is keeping you playing on our side?

It is a crime to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA agent, and those who commit it should be punished—and we can even take some satisfaction when the felons are those who advocated such laws in the first place. Nathan gives good reasons for thinking the law is a bad one, and perhaps it should be rescinded, but that is not a reason for not enforcing it against Karl, when it was enforced against Agee. All together now: Rule of Law.

There is something seriously wrong with you, Mr. Newman as well as your supporters. You want C.I.A. NOC Agents to be outed. How long do you think it will take for those agents to be killed. All of you radical liberals should all go take your "Leader" billary clinton and go start a little island paradice of appeasement and treason. Then My Commander In Chief can declare war on your pathetic "utopia" and I will prosecute it.

Go To Hell,
TED (U.S.A.R., R.O.T.C.)

Ted-- Read what I wrote; it's your "Commander in Chief's" lieutenants who are the ones outing CIA agents for partisan purposes. Most of the time they shouldn't have their idenities revealed and won't (that's why they're called "secret agents" cause it's a secret-- no one knows.) But where people in authority recognize wrong-doing, it shouldn't be a crime to stop government misuse of power, as the CIA has.