I've always thought that if you have to be instructed in ethics, you'll never have them. These briefings, however, are a good thing because they're about the law and the ways you can put your butt in a sling by being too chummy with a reporter or not recognizing that you're being set up.

I don't think anybody should resign over this. It's a manufactured scandal. If it were real, Joe Wilson would have been charged for outing his wife and she would have been disciplined for cooperating. The CIA bureaucracy has declared war on POTUS, and they should be exposed and fired.

I think that everybody in this thing has something to be criticized for. Bush should have dumped Tenet when he took over. Rove and Libby shouldn't be talking to reporters off the record. The only thing done right was putting Judy Miller in jail for a while.

There are laws and regulations that say that Rove MUST lost his security clearance for talking about the CIA agent with a reporter – intentional or not.

If there are, I'm sure you wouldn't mind citing them specifically?

The CIA leak investigation has prompted President Bush to order his aides to brush up on the ethics

I think there are laws in place that cover this, and we don't - or didn't used to - live in a country where the President can decide what the laws are or whether or not to enforce some but not others.

There are laws and regulations that say that Rove MUST lost his security clearance for talking about the CIA agent with a reporter - intentional or not. (He has said that he did do this but claims it was not intentional.) There is also a confidentiality agreement that Rove signed that covers this. We don't want people in positions to unintentionally blurt out our most important secrets, as Rove claims he did - or worse, to intentionally leak them, as some suspect Rove did.

What we have here is someone - Bush? - blocking enforcement of these laws, regulations and agreements in order to keep Rove on staff and with a clearance.

Regardless of whether one feel that the CIA is "anti-American" or not, the laws, regulations and agreements should be followed.

As far as getting security clearances, temporary ones can be issued for a person to do their job. This is typically done in the early part of an administration. It is supposed to be temporary while a normal security clearance is issued but sometimes this doesn't happen. Sometimes this because of time, the person in question leaves the government but I guess it is possible for someone who wouldn't pass a normal clearance to be given a temporary one for convenience of the administration. Personnally, I have no doubt Sandy Berger will be given a security clearance if the next adminstration is Democratic.

But to come at this ethics thing from another angle, anybody remember Philip Cooney, the guy who was hired from the oil industry, to edit down (sex down?) climate change reports for the Whitehouse? He resigned in "disgrace" and then seemlessly went to work for Exxon, the same company that had earlier been charged with shaping administration policy.

So anyway, at this late date, what are the "ethics" going to be? Is it "don't manipulate the facts" ... how can it be when that has been standard operating procedure for the entire reign of GWB?

See also data manipulation at the fisheries and food and drug administrations ...

HONESTLY, folks, why can't we all admit it and say at the outset that

I'm not. What do the applicable laws say?
It is an interesting question, because various
players in the bureaucracy could use security clearance denial to block an appointment.

And these remedial courses are a close second.

Firing Rove may well be the right thing to do, however, for a variety of reasons.

I wonder if the FBI or the CIA can themselves remove Rove's security clearance, or is that up to the White House? Anyone know?