Connecting dots

We'll take advantage of a quiet weekend to make note a few things. First, the firing of CIA agent Mary McCarthy for allegedly being the source of the leak to the Washington Post about the illegal GWOT prisons in Poland and Romania. The inevitable right-wing exulting seems oblivious to where all this leads: that the US now has in effect an Official Secrets Act. We noted this possibility at the time that Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Scooter Libby, where there are a couple of sentences from his news conference that deserve very close attention as people speculate about further indictments:

I will confirm that her [Valerie Plame's] association with the CIA was classified at that time through July 2003. ...

And all I'll say is that if national defense information which is involved because her affiliation with the CIA, whether or not she was covert, was classified, if that was intentionally transmitted, that would violate the statute known as Section 793, which is the Espionage Act.

That is a difficult statute to interpret. It's a statute you ought to carefully apply. I think there are people out there who would argue that you would never use that to prosecute the transmission of classified information, because they think that would convert that statute into what is in England the Official Secrets Act ...

So there are people who should argue that you should never use that statute because it would become like the Official Secrets Act. I don't buy that theory, but I do know you should be very careful in applying that law because there are a lot of interests that could be implicated in making sure that you picked the right case to charge that statute.

Note in particular the distinction between "covert" and "classified", missing from much of the analysis of the Plame case. The supposed differences between the Espionage Act and the Official Secrets Act also figure in another case: the prosecution of lobbyists Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman for receiving leaks of classified information:

For more than two decades, Steven J. Rosen sleuthed the tight-lipped government back channels of the United States and Israel for tidbits he could quietly pass to his powerful employer, the pro-Israel lobby called AIPAC. As a result, he would joke over restaurant tables that he was glad the United States did not have an Official Secrets Act that would render his vocation a crime.

But his quip turned out to be prescient. The FBI placed him and a junior colleague under surveillance -- listening to their phone calls and watching their meetings, including those with a Pentagon official who was cooperating with authorities. Last year, Rosen and Keith Weissman were fired by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and then indicted on charges of receiving and transmitting national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act.

Incidentally, Rosen's defence lawyers intend to argue that by the standards of this prosecution, he was receiving classified information for years, including from Condoleezza Rice, a former colleague of his at the RAND Corporation. So in summary, before hailing a crackdown on leaks of classified information, be sure to know where it's headed. [see update]

One other thread. When the bizarre New York Post Page Six extortion scandal blew up a few weeks ago, we suspected that there might be a Republican angle, given the Democratic donor credentials of the target of the alleged extortion, Ron Burkle. De facto pro-Bush blogger Mickey Kaus certainly thinks that Burkle's ties to the Clintons merit some muckracking, and the New York Times helps out with a story that veers into jaded Clinton scandal recounting:

The Clintons have a somewhat checkered history of investing with personal associates. An investment in the failed Arkansas real estate deal known as Whitewater led to a government investigation that nearly brought down Mr. Clinton's presidency and left the couple with millions of dollars in legal bills.

The NYT doesn't try to explain how a failed real estate deal led to impeachment, because it's so convoluted but also involves some inglorious NYT reporting. Much of the rest of the story seems to be implying that there's something untoward about the Clinton-Burkle friendship; leaving aside the apparent assumption that only Texan oilmen get to make big money without questions being asked, one wonders if the seeds of one of many anti-Hillary '08 strategies are being sown.

UPDATE: For example, when the Sunday Times quotes old Iran-Contra hand Micheal Ledeen in the following:

IRAN’S president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, attended a meeting in Syria earlier this year with one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, according to intelligence experts and a former national security official in Washington.
US officials and Israel intelligence sources believe Imad Mugniyeh, the Lebanese commander of Hezbollah’s overseas operations, has taken charge of plotting Iran’s retaliation against western targets should President George W Bush order a strike on Iranian nuclear sites.

Mugniyeh is on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list for his role in a series of high-profile attacks against the West, including the 1985 hijacking of a TWA jet and murder of one of its passengers, a US navy diver.

Now in his mid-forties, Mugniyeh is reported to have travelled with Ahmadinejad in January this year from Tehran to Damascus, where the Iranian president met leaders of Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas ...

Michael Ledeen, a Middle East expert and former Pentagon and National Security Council official who wrote that Mugniyeh had “probably” been there, said last week senior American officials had confirmed it ... “It’s hard to identify Mugniyeh because he is said to have changed his face and his fingerprints,” Ledeen said. “But senior government officials have told me I was right. He was there.”

Is Ledeen citing classified information? Or has he seen too many spy films?

FINAL UPDATE: As we said, the right really needs to be careful about where a crackdown on classified information ends. Tuesday's Washington Post reports that an unusual request by the FBI to see boxes of old documents belonging to investigative journalist Jack Anderson, RIP, has developed a particular focus:

When the FBI interview took place at his home on March 3, Feldstein said, he was surprised that the agents mentioned that they were looking into the Rosen-Weissman case and possible espionage "going back to the early 1980s." They wanted to know whether "we had seen classified documents" in the Anderson files, particularly about Israel and Iran -- areas of leaked information in the lobbyists' case.

At some point during the questioning, Feldstein said, one of the agents, Leslie Martell, "began asking questions about pro-Israel reporters who had worked for Anderson" or "had ties to AIPAC."

Israel, Iran, 1980s? What could that possibly be about?