If you have been following the Scooter Libby legal scuffles or you have any interest in the CIA and how it operates, there are a couple of posts today you don't want to miss.
First is a post at Protein Wisdom titled "Open Secrets" and the second is one titled "Plame's Identity, if really a secret, was thinly veiled" which appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Excerpt:
WASHINGTON - The question of whether Valerie Plame's employment by the Central Intelligence Agency was a secret is the key issue in the two-year investigation to determine if someone broke the law by leaking her CIA affiliation to the news media.
Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald contends that Plame's friends "had no idea she had another life." But Plame's secret life could be easily penetrated with the right computer sleuthing and an understanding of how the CIA's covert employees work.
When the Chicago Tribune searched for Plame on an Internet service that sells public information about private individuals to its subscribers, it got a report of more than 7,600 words. Included was the fact that in the early 1990s her address was "AMERICAN EMBASSY ATHENS ST, APO NEW YORK NY 09255."
A former senior American diplomat in Athens, who remembers Plame as "pleasant, very well-read, bright," said he had been aware that Plame, who was posing as a junior consular officer, really worked for the CIA.
Both Jeff's post and the article in the Chicago Trib indicate how easy it is to find out information about anyone, even those supposedly under cover. I've never thought there was a case here, but even with the broadest stretch, I think it would be hard to convince a jury that Ms. Plame/Wilson was "outed" by anyone. The whole trumped up scandal has always sounded to me like something very immature individuals would think up. The idea that Dick Cheney or his Chief of Staff would have time to concern themselves with silly games like "outing" Valerie Plame to discredit her husband is something a Deaniac might think is possible or maybe something left over from the Clintonian style of personality politics of destruction. I just don't see Dick Cheney having such small-minded people around him. The tactics of a bunch of shallow high schoolers maybe.
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