The Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey Bell and William Kristol wrote a fairly predictable piece on the Republican culture of corruption in general, and the Plame scandal in specific, and not surprisingly, dismissed all the substantive charges out of hand.
The amusing part, however, was their rejection of the Plame matter through the “everybody does it'” defense.
In today’s Washington, as has been true for decades, classified information is leaked by many different players in any given policy fight in the government. The Bush administration has been replete with leaks of presumably classified information. Is the identity of Valerie Plame the most consequential leak of the last four years? Are Rove and Libby bigger leakers than, say, the CIA’s George Tenet or Richard Armitage at the State Department? Do no employees of the Central Intelligence Agency (almost universally anti-Bush and anti-conservative) ever leak anything? If so, have they been indicted, or investigated by a special prosecutor? Any prosecutor?
Clearly, Bell and Kristol have to stretch a bit by characterizing this scandal as some kind of routine matter. As Larry Johnson recently explained, it’s not every day that CIA agents under non-official cover get exposed, comprising their international contacts and colleagues, all in the context of covering up war-related lies.
But let’s take the Bell/Kristol premise one step further. As they see it, there have been other, more important leaks since Bush took office, and even bigger leakers, including Bush’s CIA director and Bush’s Deputy Secretary of State.
If Bell and Kristol are right, and a number of Bush administration officials are routinely leaking classified information, isn’t this worse? In launching a defense of the White House, aren’t Bell and Kristol essentially arguing that we have some kind of crisis in which sensitive secrets are revealed all the time on the president’s watch?
I can see Bush’s letter to the Weekly Standard now. It includes something along the lines of “don’t do me any favors…”