Treason, no less. A leading Democrat, Henry Waxman, howls in Congress that "the intentional disclosure of a covert CIA agent's identity would be an act of treason. If Rove was part of a conspiracy and intentionally disclosed the name--then that jeopardizes national security." Liberal columnists like Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times join the Waxman chorus.

But suppose one of Valerie Plame's covert CIA missions, until outed by Karl Rove, had been to liaise with Venezuelan right-wingers planning to assassinate President Hugo Chávez, possibly masquerading as a journalist and using her attractions to get close to the populist president and try to poison him, just as the agency tried to poison Fidel Castro. In an earlier incarnation Scheer would surely have been only too happy to jeopardize national security by exposing Plame's true employer.

Thirty-eight years ago Scheer was one of the editors of Ramparts, and in February 1967 that magazine ran an exposé of covert CIA funding of the National Student Association, prompting furious charges that it had endangered national security, which, from the foreign policy establishment's point of view, it most certainly had.

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