Time and Again

Time has decided to save it's bald-headed Conservative reporter from the slammer by releasing his information concerning the leaking of a CIA agent's name [which is treasonous, by the way. And Constitutionally speaking, treason is not a pleasant crime].

Atrios, again, has good thoughts on the matter, which can be summarized as this:
As a journalist, you still operate within the ethics of protecting your sources. In the corporate world of journlism, the corporation acts within the guidelines of protecting its journalists, and it will betray the same sources the journalist has protected in order to do so. This makes all source protection ethics of jornalism [within a corporate structure] worthless.

Taking a page from Karl Rove, the AntiCentenarian would like to help remind the world that this story is not simply about two hard-nosed journalists against an investigation of their sources.

It is also about the non-implication of Robert Novak, the journalist who actually wrote the exposure piece of the CIA agent in question, and who actually committed the treasonous act. Why has he not been called upon to testify? Why has he been let go without any repercussion, if these other two journalists have not? Here's the outing:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, XXX , is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.

[The AntiCentenarian won't publish the name- we respect our country's human operatives and refuse to manipulate them for political purposes. Scumbag journalists like Bob Novak suit our purposes just fine]

But the real purpose for Novak's piece is this: he was defending the President against the intelligence gleaned from Ambassador Joseph Wilson who was sent to Nigeria to uncover the truth of so-called Yellowcake Uranium which Saddam Hussein was trying to attain to build his WMD program up to Nuke the eastern seaboard of America. Wilson found no evidence of the existence of such uranium. This evidence was to be used by George Tenet in his intelligence recommendation, and was used by Colin Powell. All despite Wilson's findings that the truth was that the yellowcake did not exist.

So what this whole thing is about is the protection of the President when the intelligence he needed to get in order to justify the war... was indeed not found.

Here's the picture we have now.

• We have No WMD program in Iraq, corraborating Wilson's determination that Yellowcake was not being saught [And thus making Novak's outing of his wife that much more petty]
• We have no Iraqi connection to 9/11, despite the current attempts to reconnect Saddam to Osama.
• We have evidence that the US was pre-convicted to move against Iraq, and needed intelligence that would corraberate and justfity it.
• We have many occurances of The Administration manipulating evidence for various political purposes, and methodical Conservative protectionism and discrediting when intelligence comes out that does not fit in to their paradigm.

And it all comes down to a shoddy, misplaced, political, horrible war. Which isn't looking so peachy right now.

The point of the journalists' need to protect their sources is an absolutely vital one. But in the case of Bob Novak's reportage in this instance, he superceded it by exposing an American Intelligence Agent to potentially tremendous danger. He has to be held accountable for that action, as do the other journalists who assisted in it.

The story that they broke was not revelatory, it was felonious. There's a sincere difference. Had they exposed a CIA agent who was spying for the other side, they'd be heros. But they did so in order to expose an agent for political gain, not for the protection or betterment of society.

Huge Difference.