The Democrat CIA hypocrisy

Bret Stephens:

There is nothing more important than protecting the identities of CIA officers. So I need everybody to be clear: We will protect your identities 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 circumstances 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 surreptitiously 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 Identities 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 identity of covert agents "to any individual not authorized to receive classified information." Equally plain is the penalty: "fined under Title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned not more than three years, or both."

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The Plame game was just raw politics and had nothing to do with the true convictions of Democrats. What we are seeing now is not a search for justice either, but pandering to the kook base of the Democrat party which si devoted to resistance to fighting enemies trying to kill us and is dedicated to fighting those trying to protect us.

When it comes to intelligence and warfare, never assume that liberal Democrats are acting in good faith. You know that Obama and Holder are not in this case. For Obama who talked so much about distractions during the campaign, he is using this issue to distract his base from his failure to deliver on health care.