The most surreal aspect of the Plame-Novak-Armitage psuedo-scandal was the spectacle of watching liberal journalists pretend to be outraged by the idea that someone would leak the identity of a covert CIA operative to the press.
Leading the outrage was The Nation, which (according to The Nation) was the first publication to argue that the leak of Valerie Plame’s name was a crime:
Four and a half years ago, after reading the Robert Novak column that outed Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA operative specializing in counter-proliferation work, I wrote an article in this space noting that this particular leak from Bush administration officials might have been a violation of a federal law . . . and (perhaps worse) might have harmed national security by exposing anti-WMD operations. That piece was the first to identify the leak as a possible White House crime. . .
The leak came from the State Department, not the White House, but never mind that. The point is that The Nation was oh-so-concerned about damage to our national security caused by exposing a covert CIA desk-jockey.
Of course, they were full of it. They didn’t care about harming covert operations, they just wanted a bludgeon to use against the Bush administration. In fact, they like to expose covert operations, as they showed today:
Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. . . At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.
The Nation published the exact location of a CIA counter-terror operation in Somalia! And that tells you all you need to know about The Nation’s vaunted concern for national security.
(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)
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