Ed Driscoll, Jonathan Adler and Glenn Reynolds take the New York Times and other mainstream outlets to task for their decision to not republish the stolen emails from climate scientists on the grounds that they were illegally obtained and written with the expectation of being kept private.  After all, these outlets famously publish illegally obtained classified national security information at the drop of a hat.

While that’s a pretty persuasive critique on its face, the comparison is ultimately false.

In the case of the East Anglia listservs, the victims are private individuals.  By contrast, the Pentagon Papers and various intelligence leaks published during the Bush era were owned by the United States Government and arguably kept secret partly to shield elected leaders from political fallout.  Nor were the latter “stolen” in the same sense as the former.  Rather, people authorized to receive the information shared it with reporters who are under no obligation to protect classified secrets.

What would be interesting is to see how the NYT and others handle illegally obtained documents from people with whom they don’t politically agree.  Have they republished similarly stolen emails that were harmful to, say, tobacco companies or investment bankers?

If so, then were have a much better case for hypocrisy.

Scott Johnson contrasts the NYT’s silence on the David Rohde kidnapping to protect the safety of their reporter with “the Times’s illegal exposure of the NSA terrorist eavesdropping program in December 2005, as well as its exposure of the Treasury Department’s terrorist-finance tracking program in June 2006. Whereas the reporting of Rohde’s apprehension may have endangered his life, the disclosure of the NSA terrorist eavesdropping and terrorist finance tracking programs only threatened the security of the United States.”

First, the assertion that what the NYT did in publishing classified information was “illegal” is quite dubious for reasons I explained in my January 2006 post “Can NYT Be Prosecuted for Publishing Classified Info?” (itself a response to an article by Johnson).  See also my related post “Leaks, Whistleblowers, and Media Shield Laws.”

Further, while the juxtaposition had occurred to me as well, the cases are clearly different.  In the Rohde situation, there was clear and compelling reason to believe that a man’s life was in danger:

“From the early days of this ordeal, the prevailing view among David’s family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several governments and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times. “The kidnappers initially said as much. We decided to respect that advice, as we have in other kidnapping cases, and a number of other news organizations that learned of David’s plight have done the same. We are enormously grateful for their support.”

No such information existed with regard to the eavesdropping story.  What was put at risk was the secrecy of a government program, the legality of which is still being debated.  The “security of the United States” was put in danger only to the extent that 1) the program was effective and 2) the public knowledge that such a program existed undermined the program’s effectiveness.   Both of those are, at best, highly debatable.

While I may well have decided against publishing the story had I been the publisher of the NYT, I can certainly understand running it given the strong questions about the propriety of the program, including a seeming gross violation of the 4th Amendment rights of a wide swath of Americans.  Weighed against a highly questionable “national security” claim, that’s a pretty compelling reason to publish.   Otherwise, we’re left with a situation where the president is free to flout the law so long as he asserts a “national security” rationale and stamps a project Top Secret.

UPDATE: Marc Danziger weighs in with a much better point than Johnson’s.   Revisiting the old Mike Wallace thing about how he’d simply film a story of a American soldiers being ambushed rather than helping them because he’s not there as an American but only as a journalist, he muses,

And I can imagine how, when Rohde’s saw the uniforms of the US troops and knew that meant he was now safe, his heart must have lifted. And what’s wrong with that, of course is that he wants – as the Col. Connell suggests – to be able to claim sanctuary from his countrymen. Now I don’t know Rohde’s work, and I’m not going to claim that he’s remotely where Wallace claimed to be while sitting in the comfort of a videotaped seminar. But his institution is. And that’s a problem to me. Because it was US soldiers who gave Rohde’s sanctuary, not some mercenary force fighting in the name of the NY Times or international journalism.

The other problem is, if anything, more serious. And it is the simple fact that we are increasingly living in a society that plays by Ottoman rules; meaning that what the rules are depend – of course – on who you are. That’s not something we will survive for long, and simply put, it needs to be exposed and stamped out anywhere we see it.

So I’m glad that the NY Times and journalists could sit on an exciting story to help save one of their own. In the future, will they do this to save some random civilian, or some US soldier?

It’s an interesting question, indeed.

In the comments to my latest post on domestic oil production, in which I continue my skepticism over the benefits to more domestic oil production, a number of claims were made in the comments that raised some interesting issues. So I thought it might be worthwhile if I went ahead and investigated some of these claims and presented the evidence. Some of these claims are going to require more research than others, so I’ll be spreading them out over several posts.

For today, the claim I thought would be the easiest to look up was the continuous repeat of John McCain’s recent claim that there were no significant spills from offshore oil platforms due to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Is this true?

Well, the U.S. Minerals Management Service commissioned a study of this very issue, which concluded that:

The impacts from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were typical of this historical experience. While cleanup was required. The volume of oil spilled and impacts to shore from the offshore infrastructure were categorized as minor.

Case closed, right? Well, not exactly. Reading further into the study reveals the total extent of the damage:

As a result of both storms, 124 spills were reported with a total volume of roughly 17,700 barrels of total petroleum products, of which about 13,200 barrels were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 4,500 barrels were refined products from platforms and rigs. Pipelines were accountable for 72 spills totaling about 7,300 barrels of crude oil and condensate spilled into the [Gulf of Mexico]. Response and recovery efforts kept the impacts to a minimum with no onshore impacts from these spill events.

How can we evaluate whether this amount spilled was truly “minor”? The criteria I think it’s best to focus on are the guidelines are spelled out in the Code of Federal Regulations and used by the EPA and Coast Guard to evaluate oil spills:

(1) Minor discharge means a discharge to the inland waters of less than 1,000 gallons of oil or a discharge to the coastal waters of less than 10,000 gallons of oil.

(2) Medium discharge means a discharge of 1,000 to 10,000 gallons of oil to the inland waters or a discharge of 10,000 to 100,000 gallons of oil to the coastal waters.

(3) Major discharge means a discharge of more than 10,000 gallons of oil to the inland waters or more than 100,000 gallons of oil to the coastal waters.

17,700 barrels of oil corresponds to 743,400 gallons, which is more than sufficient to qualify as a “major discharge” under Federal guidelines. Now, that 743,400 gallons is certainly small potatoes compared to the over 8 million gallons of oil which spilled inland along the Mississippi River and other locations in Louisiana. Still, if it’s over seven times what the EPA considers a “major discharge”, I have to take issue with the MMS’s report characterization of the spill as “minor.” While it appears that no individual leak appears to have been a major discharge, the sum total of oil spilled from oil platforms after Katrina and Rita is more than enough to qualify as one.

Thankfully, the environmental impacts from these spills appear to be minor. But the idea that there were “no significant leaks” from offshore platforms after Katrina and Rita doesn’t appear to be justified by the evidence.

Photo credit: NOAA

Speaking of decrepit New York City landmarks, Mark Leon Goldberg reports on a major renovation of the 50-year-old United Nations building, which would have condemned “long ago if not for the fact that it falls under international jurisdiction.”

According to the UN News Centre, the current buildings are “plagued by leaks, safety violations and outdated systems.”

Somehow, that seems fitting.

In an embarrassing technical glitch, Diebold has accidentally released the 2008 election results early, revealing that John McCain will win with 48 percent of the vote. ONN has the video report:

Of course, I told you this months ago.

via Thoreau

Howie Kurtz has an interesting piece on how mainstream media coverage of allegations of sexual misconduct have changed in recent years. It begins:

When Gennifer Flowers held a news conference in 1992 to announce that she had carried on an affair with Bill Clinton, the New York Times devoted one paragraph of a news story to her charges.

“I am ashamed for my profession,” Max Frankel, then the paper’s editor, said afterward. “We don’t want to report on the candidates’ sex lives.”

The contrast with the paper’s coverage of the John McCain-Vicki Iseman story is stark. Kurtz is right, though, that the primary difference is not that Clinton had a (D) after his name and McCain and (R). Rather, the media climate itself has been radically altered:

In a marked change since the Flowers era, the mere fact that a news organization is pursuing a scandal routinely leaks out. Matt Drudge became famous for reporting in 1998 that Newsweek had spiked a story about a special prosecutor investigating President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky. It was hardly surprising when Drudge’s gossip site reported in December that Times staffers were pursuing the McCain story. Dissatisfied journalists tend to be talkative.

Rumors of a story — or the reporting of a story by a venue of little repute — is now considered justification for coverage of the story. Indeed, I’ve done that at OTB more than once. While I generally decline to comment on truly salacious rumors unless they’re widely discussed in mainstream sources, interesting rumors on high-traffic venues like the Drudge Report are sometimes difficult to pass up.

And then there’s this:

The hardest thing in journalism is to spend months on a story and then admit you haven’t got the goods. There is, instead, a tendency to dress the thing up with fine writing and larger themes in an effort to demonstrate that it’s not just about sex, when of course that is the only element most readers — and the rest of the media — will focus on.

For the most part, doing that is fine. Coverage of “larger themes” is often valuable. What Keller and company should have done, though, is to delete the sex scandal material altogether from last week’s piece and put it in either the Sunday magazine or inside the paper along with other feature stories. By putting it in the lead spot on page one, they gave the impression that they had hard news when all they had was a reflections piece.

Photo credit: Steve Rhodes

Via the LAT: After outing Apple for years, blog shuts down

After a long battle with Apple Inc., a Harvard University senior said Thursday that he would shut down Think Secret, the website known for landing scoops about the company’s latest products. Apple was peeved by the leaks and sued him in 2005.

The site’s demise prompted outrage from some Apple followers, but in this case David — aka Nicholas Ciarelli — got his own happy ending: freedom from having to run the site anymore. Ciarelli, 22, graduates this spring and said he was more than ready to abandon the site he had run since he was a 13-year-old Mac fanatic.

He also received a payment from Apple, according to a person familiar with the case. Both sides declined to discuss details of the agreement.

Hopefully it was a generous payment.

This story has long struck me as odd, given that I can see no basis for Apple blocking the publication of rumors. If they have an employee violating a non-disclosure agreement, then go after that employee. Further, it is ironic, at a minimum, that a technology company that seeks to be on the cutting edge would fail to recognize that a) it was almost impossible to stop this type of behavior and that b) it would ultimately lead to more bad PR than anything else. Of course, as the piece notes, Apple was acting like a big bully.

More details have been reported on the raid conducted by the Israeli Air Force on a base in Syria on September 6:

Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem.

The attack was launched with American approval on September 6 after Washington was shown evidence the material was nuclear related, the well-placed sources say.

They confirmed that samples taken from Syria for testing had been identified as North Korean. This raised fears that Syria might have joined North Korea and Iran in seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

Commentary is beginning to emerge from the news media and the blogosphere:

U. S. News and World Report produces a quotation from an Israeli missile warfare expert that sounds pretty close to the mark:

Said Yiftah Shapir, a missile-warfare expert at Israel’s Institute for National Strategic Studies: “My guess is that, in the worst case, North Korea gave Syria the most embryonic sort of equipment needed to manufacture nuclear weapons, which would take decades of work by thousands of technicians that Syria doesn’t have.”

The Glittering Eye wonders what it all means:

I think there’s still some room for skepticism over the nature of the site the Israelis raided. But the room is narrowing. For example, what is meant by “nuclear material”? That could cover a lot of territory, everything from fissible material to radioactive scrap. And then there’s the larger question…

Newhoggers continues to believe that it’s part of a neocon plot:

But if they had really had this evidence, they wouldn’t need to leak it to a British newspaper’s neocon shill. They could have gone public, had the data verified and stopped all of the happenings at the IAEA that Israel is so upset about dead and almost certainly have gained a UNSC resolution to boot. Then, if the air attack had gone ahead, many nations who are suspicious of anonymous leaks and scanty evidence would have stood up and cheered. There wouldn’t have to be a whisper campaign for a war which might begin with an Israeli pre-emptive attack but is surely designed to drag the U.S. in, willingly or not.

Cheat-seeking Missiles is convinced:

This certainly explains why Damascus has been nearly mute in its response to having its sovereignty invaded by the hated Jews. But what about NoKo? You’d think Li’l Kim Jong Il would have something to say, if nothing more than a lie to distance his regime from the evidence.

Ed Morrissey notes the secondary information:

Israel sought American approval for the bombing of the compound, but the Bush administration required solid proof before giving it. The Israelis brought information showing North Korean personnel staffing the facility, but Bush insisted that the Israelis had to prove that the facility was developing WMD. The raid took the nuclear material out of the compound, and only on September 6th — after testing had shown that the Israelis were correct — did they get American approval.

This gives us some interesting secondary information. First, despite its reputation, the Bush White House does not shoot first and ask questions later. Bush did not easily support this mission, even though Syria has conducted assassinations in Lebanon and supplies terrorists in Iraq. The administration wanted hard, incontrovertible proof before supporting an attack on Syria. And the Israelis waited to get it before bombing the compound, risking their intel operatives in a very dangerous burglary rather than acting unilaterally.

The Duck of Minerva offers prudent advice:

How solid this is, who knows…. But, it appears more credible than former Bush Administration officials with an ax to grind. It also suggests that this is not a neo-con fantasy story to drive policy or launch a war. Rather, its indicative of a very very serious problem–not just for the US, but for Asia, the Middle East, and any other countries concerned about Nuclear Proliferation.

Update

Pat Lang wants to know more before deciding:

Which is it? Beats me! I need more data.

Blake Hounshell transcribes Secretary of Defense Bob Gates’ comments about U.S. plans vis-a-vis Iran and Syria on yesterday’s “Fox News Sunday.” While Gates was “cagey” in his reply, using the required disclaimer that “All options are on the table,” it’s quite clear that military intervention is simply not in the cards for either set of problems.

I continue to believe that various leaks about planning for military solutions to these crises are simply exercises in maintaining some level of uncertainty in the minds of Iranian and Syrian officials to give more weight to negotiations. From all indications, though, our rivals know full well that massive air strikes, let alone ground invasion, aren’t on the table and that the only ones being fooled are Seymour Hersh and a handful of bloggers.

UPDATE: Thomas Edsall has the contrarian view at HuffPo, claiming that, “The drumbeat for a military assault on Iran is getting louder at some conservative think tanks, in the offices of hawks on the Bush and Cheney staffs, and among ground forces in Iraq dealing with weapons and explosives constructed in Iran.”

The grown-ups are universally opposed to a military solution to this problem on the very practical grounds that it will almost surely not work. While it’s true that we went to war with Iraq despite intense opposition from the foreign policy elite, the consensus on that was not nearly as strong as it is here. And the Iraqi mess itself provides all manner of constraints, political and logistical, to similar action in Iran and/or Syria.

Blake Hounshell argues that the renewed speculation by some on the left that the United States is about to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is misplaced.

By rattling some sabers, but doing so in a deniable way, the Bush administration is trying to stiffen the spines of its European partners and the IAEA. The current goal is to pass new sanctions via the U.N. Security Council, not go to war. Remember, we saw a very similar pattern of leaks and official statements in the run up to the second round of sanctions that were passed in March. That drumbeat "worked" precisely because it sounded so plausible. But the Iranians aren't fooled. Expect them to keep thumbing their noses at everyone, while offering just enough cooperation with the IAEA to sow dissension among the Western powers.

That’s almost certainly right on all counts. Winston Churchill famously said that “To jaw-jaw always is better than to war-war” and the Iranian nuclear standoff is almost a classic case of that axiom. There are no good military alternatives here and all sides know it. Still, creating a bit of fear, uncertainty and doubt on that score can help create incentive on the diplomatic front and that’s almost certainly all that’s going on here.

Donald Rumsfeld pulled the plug on a 2005 mission that might have taken out several top al Qaeda leaders for fear of alienating Pakistan, Mark Mazzetti reports in today’s NYT.

A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials. The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning. Mr. Rumsfeld decided that the operation, which had ballooned from a small number of military personnel and C.I.A. operatives to several hundred, was cumbersome and put too many American lives at risk, the current and former officials said. He was also concerned that it could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from operating in its tribal areas, the officials said.

[...]

Pentagon officials familiar with covert operations said that planners had to consider the political and human risks of undertaking a military campaign in a sovereign country, even in an area like Pakistan’s tribal lands, where the government has only tenuous control. Even with its shortcomings, Pakistan has been a vital American ally since the Sept. 11 attacks, and the militaries of the two countries have close ties.

The Pentagon officials said tension was inherent in any decision to approve such a mission: a smaller military footprint allows a better chance of a mission going undetected, but it also exposes the units to greater risk of being killed or captured.

Officials said one reason Mr. Rumsfeld called off the 2005 operation was that the number of troops involved in the mission had grown to several hundred, including Army Rangers, members of the Navy Seals and C.I.A. operatives, and he determined that the United States could no longer carry out the mission without General Musharraf’s permission. It is unlikely that the Pakistani president would have approved an operation of that size, officials said.

Some outside experts said American counterterrorism operations had been hamstrung because of concerns about General Musharraf’s shaky government. “The reluctance to take risk or jeopardize our political relationship with Musharraf may well account for the fact that five and half years after 9/11 we are still trying to run bin Laden and Zawahri to ground,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.

[...]

In early 2005, after learning about the Qaeda meeting, the military developed a plan for a small Navy Seals unit to parachute into Pakistan to carry out a quick operation, former officials said. But as the operation moved up the military chain of command, officials said, various planners bulked up the force’s size to provide security for the Special Operations forces. “The whole thing turned into the invasion of Pakistan,” said the former senior intelligence official involved in the planning. Still, he said he thought the mission was worth the risk. “We were frustrated because we wanted to take a shot,” he said.

[...]

That criticism has echoes of the risk aversion that the officials said pervaded efforts against Al Qaeda during the Clinton administration, when missions to use American troops to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan were never executed because they were considered too perilous, risked killing civilians or were based on inadequate intelligence. Rather than sending in ground troops, the Clinton White House instead chose to fire cruise missiles in what became failed attempts to kill Mr. bin Laden and his deputies — a tactic Mr. Bush criticized shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Given that the details remain classified and the story is based on leaks from disgruntled “former military and intelligence officials,” we can presume we’re not getting the whole truth. Still, this is a fascinating insight into the bureaucratic decision-making process.

Kevin Drum notes this is “eerily similar to what happened to Bill Clinton whenever he asked the Pentagon about special ops missions. Almost inevitably, what he got back was a battle plan involving hundreds or thousands of troops, which made it politically impossible to consider implementing.” Indeed.

Military planners are, at the end of the day, bureaucrats. They’ve spent a lifetime developing their expertise and are good at what they do. At the same time, however, they face institutional pressures to get everybody a piece of the pie which are reinforced by a strong CYA mentality. The result is that what could be accomplished by a single Special Forces A Team or a SEAL Task Unit winds up bloating into a giant operation involving carrier battle groups, fighter squadrons, and 15 general officers.

All officer cadets are taught Clausewitz’ dicta that war is a continuation of politics by any means and that war has its own language but not its own logic. That wars are fought to achieve political objectives and that “victory” is defined in political, not military, terms is reinforced throughout an officer’s career, from pre-commissioning training to command and staff school to the war colleges. Anyone who wears general’s stars can lead a graduate seminar on the topic.

The trouble is, few of them really believe it. They are much more comfortable with variants of the so-called Powell Doctrine, which demands overwhelming force and missions where total annihilation and the unconditional surrender of the enemy are the only acceptable outcomes. As satisfying as that may be from the standpoint of those asking their troops to risk everything, it seldom comports with the very murky and limited political objectives at hand.

This clash between politicians and their military leadership leads to mixed outcomes. In Desert Storm, we needlessly delayed operations while we massed far, far more troops than were needed for the mission. Fortunately, Saddam allowed it to happen rather than launching a preemptive strike into Saudi Arabia. In Kosovo, we killed far more civilians than necessary because we decided (and it’s not clear yet who “we” was in this case — the politicians, the generals, or both) to eschew ground action for weeks while fighting from the safety of the air.

In Iraq, Rumsfeld rebuffed the advice of the generals who told him that we needed a much larger troop presence to topple the regime. He correctly insisted that our advantages in speed, technology, and training obviated the need for mass. Of course, sometimes the generals are right: We clearly needed a much larger force for the post-war stabilization operation.

Most of the blame for that goes to Rumsfeld’s stubborn insistence on sticking with his theory of modern warfare long after the facts pointed in the other direction. One wonders, though, how much of that was because of the military leadership’s long tradition of overselling the enemy and always pleading that they need more resources.

As one would expect, last evening’s news that President Bush has commuted Scooter Libby’s jail sentence has spawned a huge amount of controversy in the blogosphere, with some decrying it as the greatest outrage since Watergate and others complaining it didn’t go far enough.

From the Left:

• Nancy Pelosi: “The President’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence does not serve justice, condones criminal conduct, and is a betrayal of trust of the American people.”
• Marcy Wheeler: “This amounts to nothing less than obstruction of justice.”
• Jane Hamsher: “This president’s contempt for the rule of law is thorough and complete.”
• Jeralyn Merritt: “President Bush’s commutation of I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby’s sentence is simply stunning, both in its hypocrisy and its arrogance.”
• Reid Stott: “[T]he Bush administration simply no longer gives a damn, about public opinion or the rule of law.”
• Doug Berman: “It will be interesting to see if, after the President has made clear that he views the guidelines are “excessive” for one of his pals, others with sentencing power begin to give less respect to the guidelines when the fates of less connected defendants are in the balance.”
• Anonymous Liberal: “Libby, apparently, doesn’t deserve to be treated the way the law demands that others be treated. He’s special. And what makes him special? Clearly nothing other than the fact that he is a well-connected Republican.”
• Bob Cesca: “If Scooter Libby had been some unfortunate nobody who was either black or poor or retarded . . . “
• Digby: “This is a very, very depressing day, even though we knew it would happen in one way or another. It’s just a continuation of this administration’s complete disregard for the law and their belief that they are entitled to special treatment because, well, they are just, so special.”
• Duncan Black: “President Bush engages in ongoing obstruction of justice by commuting Scooter Libby’s sentence.”
• Taylor Marsh: “George W. Bush today proved that the rule of law doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican. It’s all about the rule of politics.”

From the Right:

• Patrick Frey: “You do the crime, you do the time. The jury said Scooter Libby did the crime. He should do the time.”
• Steven Taylor: “One cannot lie to a grand jury and since he was a public servant at the time, that would seem to make the lying all the more problematic.”
• Ed Morrissey: “It strikes a balance that few will appreciate now, but later will accept as wise, as far as it goes.”
• Jay Currie: “Justice would have been served by a full pardon; but Bush rarely gets stuff right.”
• Rob Bluey: “Libby still has to pay a $250,000 fine and will be left scarred permanently, a penalty that’s harsh enough.”
• Andrew Sullivan: “When there are no normal channels of governance in this White House, it means the fusion of Cheney-Bush acting as extra-legal agents of their own power. We really no longer have the rule of law operating. We have the privileges and lies and policies of two men. The law is no competitor. And shamelessness is their ally.”
• Orin Kerr: “I find Bush’s action very troubling because of the obvious special treatment Libby received.”

The claims that this is somehow and “obstruction of justice” or outside the “rule of law” are simply bizarre. This power is expressly granted to the president in the Constitution. Indeed, it’s in the first sentence of the part of the Constitution which delineates the powers of the president (Article II, Section 2):

The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

It’s listed before the enumeration of his foreign policy duties, for goodness sakes. The issuance of a pardon or commutation isn’t a sidestepping of the process: It is expressly a part of the process.

Further, this power is plenary. He doesn’t need anyone’s permission to exercise it nor does he need to jump through any hoops. Yes, there are long-established bureaucratic processes whereby the Justice Department vets petitions. They were put in place because presidents seldom know anything about the cases in question and don’t have time to read petitions that come pouring in. That obviously doesn’t apply in this case. As Bill Dyer observes,

Critics see it as cronyism, but in fact, no one is better qualified to judge the value of Libby’s public service than President Bush. Huge, huge portions of what Scooter Libby did as a key inside figure in implementing the Administration’s response to 9/11 and global terrorism is still highly classified. But the President knows on a first-hand basis what the man contributed, what its value has been, and under what critical and pressure-filled circumstances he served. And as it happens, George W. Bush is the one person in whom the Constitution entrusts the power to weigh that public service against the serious crimes of which Libby stands convicted. And he clearly thinks “this particular convicted felon” is deserving, even though there will be a political price to pay.

As to the “special treatment” issue: Of course it’s special treatment. Were Libby not a senior administration official, he’d never have been in this mess to begin with.

I heard Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this morning on NPR saying that Libby’s conviction “was the one faint glimmer of accountability for White House efforts to manipulate intelligence.” That’s exactly why he should have been pardoned, in my view.

First, because there was no underlying crime in the “efforts to manipulate intelligence.” Despite spending millions of dollars and years investigating the leaks, no one was ever charged. Indeed, we quickly found out who had told Bob Novak about Valerie Plame’s CIA job — and it wasn’t Scooter Libby. Yet, Richard Armitage, the actual leaker, was never charged.

Second, and more importantly, the responsibility for “efforts to manipulate intelligence” goes to the top. To the extent that information supporting going to war was cherry picked, it wasn’t Scooter Libby’s doing. Yes, he was in a powerful position as the VP’s chief of staff. He was not, however, a decision maker. If someone is going to be “accountable” for whatever offenses Reid imagines occurred, it should be George W. Bush. He is, after all, The Decider. He, not Scooter Libby, is The Commander Guy.

If Reid and Pelosi think the administration should be held accountable for manipulating intelligence, the same Constitution that empowers President Bush to commute Scooter Libby’s sentence gives them a remedy: Begin impeachment proceedings. In my view, that would be about the dumbest thing they could do, politically. But that’s the appropriate recourse if they actually believe the administration lied to get us into a war. If, on the other hand, it’s just cheap political rhetoric, they should pipe down.

Carol Leonnig, who covers the federal courts for WaPo and with whom I had the pleasure of sitting during my brief stint covering the Libby trail, shoots down “5 Myths About Scooter and the Slammer.”

Her column will irritate both Libby’s strongest supporters and most vehement critics.

It’s now rather clear that Libby lied to the grand jury about how he found out about Valerie Plame Wilson’s employment with the CIA. At the same time, there is no evidence that he, Karl Rove, or anyone else committed a crime aside from lying to cover up their leaks to the press.

CIA sources have leaked to ABC News an alleged covert plan to destabilize the Iranian regime through non-lethal means.

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com. The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a “nonlethal presidential finding” that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions.

The sources say the CIA developed the covert plan over the last year and received approval from White House officials and other officials in the intelligence community. Officials say the covert plan is designed to pressure Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment program and end aid to insurgents in Iraq. “There are some channels where the United States government may want to do things without its hand showing, and legally, therefore, the administration would, if it’s doing that, need an intelligence finding and would need to tell the Congress,” said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism official.

Current and former intelligence officials say the approval of the covert action means the Bush administration, for the time being, has decided not to pursue a military option against Iran. “Vice President Cheney helped to lead the side favoring a military strike,” said former CIA official Riedel, “but I think they have come to the conclusion that a military strike has more downsides than upsides.”

There’s not much meat to the alleged plan laid out in the piece, so I’m less concerned than Ed Morrissey or AllahPundit that these revelations necessarily derail it. After all, the working assumption has long been that we’ve got covert ops going on in Iran for both intelligence collection and counter-regime purposes. Indeed, it’s quite possible that these “leaks” are part of an authorized psychological warfare campaign aimed at bolstering diplomatic efforts and/or strengthening the resolve of anti-regime players in Iran.

If that’s not the case, however, and these are rogue agents going to the press over internal policy disputes, they should be rooted out and put in jail for a very long time. We simply can not have people entrusted with classified mission going to the press when they don’t like their orders.

That’s true regardless of the merits of the plan. The details outlined in ABC’s report are sketchy at best and I don’t have the expertise in ops planning or the Iranian situation to effectively assess it, anyway. Offhand, I’m skeptical at plans to “destabilize” regimes unless there’s a pretty good answer to “And then what?” at the ready.

Still, that’s a call that the president gets to make, not the hired help.

UPDATE: In the comments below, Dave Schuler draws attention to Dan Drezner’s remarks on this, with which I largely concur. Money quote: “If I have to choose between a 20% chance at regime change (I’m being generous) or an 80% chance of Iran’s current regime agreeing to suspend its nuclear weapons program (equally generous), I’ll take the latter option.” I would put the odds at something closer than 2% and 30%, but yes.

Steven Taylor’s comparison is also apt: “[T]his news is about as shocking as a headline that states: ‘Jerry Sloan Authorizes New Plan to Slow Tim Duncan for Game 3′—of course the administration has covert processes in place to try and destabilize Iran.”

Valerie Plame has been invited to testify before Congress. About nothing in particular.

Democratic lawmakers are eager to hear from outed CIA operative Valerie Plame as they try to make political fodder out of the 2003 leak scandal.

Plame was scheduled to testify before a congressional committee Friday, but it was unlikely the hearing would offer any new information about the Bush administration’s discussions of her employment at the spy agency. “Valerie’s going to be talking in general about the need to protect intelligence assets,” her attorney, Melanie Sloan, said prior to her appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “She’s basically talking about how important national intelligence is and about how leaking is bad.”

Her prepared testimony would take about five minutes, Sloan said, and wouldn’t include any behind-the-scenes details about the CIA or the White House.

The man with that kind of information is Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who spent years investigating the leak and interviewed President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and several top aides and journalists. But Fitzgerald isn’t talking, citing federal rules prohibiting such discussions. And nobody from the White House involved in the leak was scheduled to testify. Nor was someone from the State Department, where the leak of Plame’s identity originated.

The use of Congressional “hearings” as political publicity stunts are nothing new nor by any means limited to Democrats. Still, it’s rather hilarious to do so this on a four-year-old scandal that was turned over to a special prosecutor who closed his years-long investigation without charging anyone with a crime related to the subject of said investigation. (He did, however, successfully prosecute the crime of lying during said investigation. Yay.)

The upside is that Congress will get a five minute lecture on how bad leaks are. If anyone needs that, it’s Congress.

UPDATE: Richard Leiby and Walter Pincus lead their WaPo coverage of this dog-and-pony show with this jawdropper:

She has been silent nearly four years.

I guess if you don’t count the press releases, press conferences, magazine interviews ….