Criminalization of Leaking Secrets Will Bite Progressives

Left wing Nathan Newman blogs This New York Times article details the way government secrets have always leaked to the press and makes an argument for why the likely Plame indictments may chill public information in all sorts of unexpected ways. I actually care far less about the official government source dance with the prostrate media than the likely chilling of internal dissenters finding themselves scared to death to talk to the press about illegal skullduggery for fear of indictment.

One wonders if these left wing moonbats would be so eager for internal dissenters being free to talk to the press about illegal skullduggery if a Dem was in the White House.

Two years ago I said that I thought the Plame disclosure should not be a crime.

You are right. She was not a covered agent in the last five years. It was not a crime.

That doesn't mean that I don't think that government officials shouldn't be held responsible for their attacks on people like Plame and Joe Wilson. What is needed is a real system of whistleblower protection where any retaliation against government employee's exercising free speech rights should be met with strong sanctions.

Would that apply regardless of which party was in power? It seems I remember Dems being upset about disclosures of what Clinton did with his pants down in the Oval Office with an intern.

But criminalizing information disclosure, except in EXTREME circumstances, is a recipe for unaccountable government where mistakes and evil deeds are buried under top secret classficiation.

Maybe it is an EXTREME circumstance if the President is caught with his pants down.

When the indictments come down this week, I'll enjoy the schadenfreude of watching the frog march of Bush officials, but in the long term it's all bad news in strengthening the secrecy of the national security state. I guarantee that the indictments against White House officials will be returned a hundredfold in the future with theats to every minor official in government to stay silent or face retaliation by the Justice Department. We will celebrate this week -- and I'll be there cheering -- but it will bite progressives in the ass so many ways in the future that I can't count the ways.

I doubt there will be a lot of frog marching, and there may be more tears than cheering in the left side of the blogosphere.

LeanLeft blogged Nathan is right about their being too much secrecy in the government, and he is right that we need better whistleblower protections. But I don’t see how he can believe that outing Valerie Plame and the company that was her cover does not count as an extreme situation. Plame’s cover and the cover of her company allowed the United States to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on nuclear material. The leak destroyed years worth of anti-proliferation work, making the country less safe. The leak put lives at risk, and made it very much harder for the US government to recruit foreigners to help, and probably sent a chill down the spine of every CIA agent in the field.

I find that hard to believe. Plame had not been in the field in many years, and her "outing" was for sending her husband, who had no experience in nuclear material, to produce a false report to try to embarras the President.

No one has ever suggested that Plame or the people at her cover company were doing anything illegal, unethical, or contrary to the wishes of Congress or the President.

Really? Well I will say it. What Plame did was persuade the CIA to send her husband to do something he had no experience in, so that he could attempt to discredit Bush and thus allow the CIA to control the outcome of an election. The Left Wing loonies may not see anything wrong with that, because it was something they wanted to see done, but I wonder if they would have felt the same way if the CIA had worked against a Democratic President to try to install a Republican.

The entire purpose of this leak was to embarrass a political opponent. If this leak is not worth punishing, then no leak is.

Are the current laws on secrecy probably too strict? Are the current whistleblower protections probably too weak? Absolutely on both counts. But the solution to that problem is not to ignore those laws when their use is justified. Rather, progressives should be focusing on reforming the laws in question. There are some secrets worth keeping,

Like when a Democratic President can't keep his pants on in the Oral Office

and it does no one any good when an Administration can destroy and anti-proliferation operation and put the lives of people who worked on that operation at risk for no reason than saving a couple of points in their approval ratings. If the people behind the leak can be brought to justice, it is not a good thing because it makes life more difficult for the Bush Administration. It is a good thing because it helps protect the security of the United States.