Cliff puts a number of superb questions. I have a couple of questions, too.

Let’s leave aside for a moment the implausibility of a “war” declared on Wilson wherein the strategy was evidently to sit in your White House office and wait for reporters to call you. After all, government officials should not be cavalier with the identities of covert agents (if, in fact, the officials know they are actually talking about covert agents) no matter who makes the call. That’s clear enough.

But, can someone explain to me why it would be OK for Matthew Cooper to be poking around trying to confirm whether someone is in the CIA?

As I understand it, if there is something sensitive about a person’s connection to an intelligence agency, that is the kind of thing it would be irresponsible for a journalist to publish. (Robert Novak, for example, has apparently said that if he had known Plame was covert he would never have published her name.)

From Cooper’s point of view, I can see only two possibilities for why what he was doing was proper. First, since it was highly relevant to the public’s understanding of how Wilson, an enemy of the administration’s Iraq policy, somehow got chosen by the CIA to go on this trip to Niger, it would be appropriate for a reporter to explain that Wilson’s wife had been able to grease the skids for him by virtue of the fact that she worked at the CIA. In this particular, a responsible reporter would be putting a strange story in some understandable context. Since this was an important story, there would be no reason for Cooper to suspect he was doing anything wrong pursuing it, but neither should there have been anything wrong in his sources’ providing the clarifying information.

Second, and relatedly, Cooper would have been acting properly if, under the circumstances, he did not think he was asking his sources to commit a crime. That is, he did not think he was asking them to communicate classified information and he had no reason to think what he was told was in fact classified –because he wasn’t told Plame was a covert agent, and the mere fact that she worked for the CIA (as many thousands do) was unremarkable.

My point here is: Doesn’t there have to be some harmony in our assessment of both the White House officials and the reporters in this case? Especially since it appears — from what we know about Cooper at least — that the reporters were actively soliciting the information, not passively taking it? If what they were asking for was a crime to provide, why are we giving them a pass for asking? And, in the alternative, if what the reporters were asking for was relevant, important, non-classified information, why was it not appropriate for administration officials to provide it?

Put another way, isn’t the Left trying to have it both ways here? Namely: it was OK for Wilson to suggest he was chosen for this mission on absolute merit (and thus maximize the damage to the administration of what turns out to be his disingenuous op-ed), but the public was not entitled to know that he got the gig because of his wife, not because of any special expertise he had.

Why should the CIA — by outrageously authorizing Wilson to write a partisan op-ed about an intelligence mission but then going bonkers when the unclassified fact that Plame worked for the CIA was similarly publicized — be permitted to give Americans half the story on something as important as Saddam’s WMD efforts?