Spies Like Us

I’m sure most of you know by now that our government shut down a web site they created in March that made public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war (this was reported in the New York Times). The reason why the site was shut down was because officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency and elsewhere complained that information contained on the site provided all some unscrupulous individuals would need to create a nuclear bomb.

As noted here via Atrios, Will Bunch is all over this one, quite rightly asking the wingnuts why they would want to help Iran (or anyone else) make a nuke (from what I’ve been able to determine, the wingnuts wanted this information published to show that Saddam Hussein was a threat worthy of our pre-emptive war, seeing as how people are sick of all of this and the Repugs are taking a beating in the polls over it).

So, for the sake of political expediency, the Repugs and their fellow travelers decided to endanger all life on this planet.

As I’ve said many times before, there is NO LINE these people will not cross.

And by the way, I happened to come across this column from Andrew C. McCarthy of the National Review Online (not the “Mannequin,” brat-pack ‘80s actor, but someone else altogether) in which McCarthy chastises Dana Priest of the Washington Post for supposedly publishing classified information in her columns (this was part of the right-wing diversion strategy as a result of the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity as a spy).

McCarthy notes the following:

Federal law makes it a crime to disclose certain types of classified information such as nuclear secrets, data about intercepted information or codes, or the identities of covert case officers or agents working for the United States. The espionage statutes bar providing classified information to foreigners with intent to harm the United States.

I wish the statutes could cover everyone including all of the right-wing cheerleaders who advocate publishing Iraq’s nuclear secrets such as Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, etc., but at the very least, the statues should serve to restrict the actions of the conservatives who advocated publishing this information to begin with.

So here’s my question: when are those responsible for putting up this web site on Iraq going to be prosecuted under the statutes McCarthy notes above?

Probably at about the same time when we get an actual apology from these individuals for these actions, I would guess, which is to say never.