Rational Grounds

On a purely instrumentalist level the Plame and McCarthy leaks are very different, of course. Plame was burned in a hamfisted attempt to discredit her husband, Joe Wilson, who was making trouble for the Administration by trumpeting the fact that they were pulling a fast one on the American public. It was a criminal act that damaged national security done out of self-dealing and spite. Mary McCarthy's leak was an attempt to stop a global network of secret prisons, a moral travesty and terrible stain on America's record. Sure, they both broke the law by leaking classified information, but one has to look at motives and ends when judging an action, not just the black letter of the law. Of course, that's exactly the argument used by Administration supporters when defending Bush et. al.'s violations. One has to evaluate cases such as these with the law as merely one metric among several. Larry Johnson, ex-CIA, sums this up succinctly over at TPMCafe:

While I'm neither a fan nor friend of Mary's, she may have done a service for her country. She was a lousy manager in my experience, but she is not a traitor and has not betrayed the identity of an undercover intelligence officer. That dirty work was done by the minions of George Bush and Dick Cheney. It is important to keep that fact in the forefront as the judgment on Mary McCarthy's acts is rendered.

This administration has used the classification and de-classification of information in extremely selective and self-serving ways these past few years. As the Times reminds us:

"It's a terrible situation when the president approves the leak of a highly classified N.I.E., and people at the agency see management as so disastrous that they feel compelled to talk to the press," said one former C.I.A. officer with extensive overseas experience.

The Times also mentions that CIA head Porter Goss has made it a priority to staunch leaks to the press. Of course, that's why he was put in that position. The CIA was a prime source of leaks in the run-up to the Iraq War and afterwards, undermining the Administration's party line on WMDs, Al-Qaeda ties, and the Iraqi insurgency. That had to be nipped in the bud, and Goss was tasked with breaking the Agency to the Administration's will.

The protection of classified information is vital to national security, and it exists in necessary tension with the American people's right to know what their government is doing in their name, not only to adequately judge the job their elected officials are doing but also to reign in gross abuses of power. I think McCarthy's leak was necessary and the right thing to do, as was the leaking of the NSA's illegal domestic wiretapping program. Obviously the leaking itself was also illegal, and it should be. Ultimately, I don't see a good comprehensive system for objectively determining what classified information needs to be leaked and what doesn't.