Quote:
Originally posted by keyboardf12
So a CIA agent getting outed, lives put in danger, years of contacts and anti-terrorism networks possibly wasted as well as a possible afront to national security solely for political revenge is just not as exciting as baseball?
Gotcha.
Check.
You have a good one james.
Be glad you don't have any relatives who disagree with the White House, and work for the CIA.
My father has trained many of the people who now work at the NSA and the CIA. My father is a mathematician--many of his graduate students found jobs there. I have stayed in their homes in Washington.
Whose lives were put in danger? Answer a simple question. A lot of "intelligence" isn't "covert" and doesn't involve "deep cover operatives", slinking about with pistols in a hostile environment. They're just very smart people who go out and ask questions and piece together data in a file. You seem to imply that everything the CIA does is cloak and dagger, deep-cover stuff. A lot of people who work for the CIA do things like: read newspapers. Look at satellite photos. Etc. There's no James Bond mystique involved.
Real spying hasn't been anything like James Bond since Britain and "ULTRA"--which included eminent mathematicians like Alan Turing--which broke a cryptographic scheme the Germans thought was unbreakable. The U.S. cracked the Japanese diplomatic code, "Purple", using very, very smart people--mathematicians. I don't think you know what real spying is actually about.
I think you're living in a James Bond world. Stop watching that crap and learn some real math.
Your willingness to hate America sickens me. And you haven't got the foggiest clue what you are talking about.
It's bad enough that the bureaucracy leaked a name. It shouldn't have happened. I agree completely.
William Buckley has publicly admitted he was a CIA agent at one time, however. No one has killed him, yet. His admission didn't endanger anyone, or presumably he would have been prosecuted. Knowing that someone worked for the CIA is NOT a terrible, horrible, ugly secret. It depends on what the person was doing for the CIA.
Should it be illegal to leak the names of people who do janitorial work at the CIA?
In the grand scheme of things, this doesn't actually matter. If you have better information, tell me who died, or what was compromised. Until I see evidence that something bad happened, I'm not convinced this was anything but a very stupid bureaucratic mistake. If the bureaucrat can be found, prosecute that person. But don't give me a stupid argument that the Bush administration is leaking information to punish people at a personnel level, from the top down. Bush doesn't have evil mind control over every fool in the bureaucracy, regardless of what "wannabe-Watergate II" theorists want to believe.
If you want to get nasty, we can talk about Linda Tripp, and what happened to her, in terms of personnel. THAT was a REAL top-down decision. Her stories about how she found all four of her car tires slashed and how her cat died are also interesting. THIS appears to be a leak from somewhere in the bureaucracy. Novak is saying the leak didn't come from the White House.
Get a life.
What else did you expect him to say? You show them Mr. Prez! 
