Wilson CIA leak

Josh Marshall asks,

Shall we up the ante?
The entire Wilson/Plame story and the Rove/White House criminal probe sub-story are just so many threads thrown off a much larger and more consquential ball of yarn: the administration's use of fraudulent evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program to seal the deal for war on Iraq with the American people. That's where the real cover up is. These are just side stories. So why not cut to the chase and have a real investigation to get to the bottom of that?

No. I'd rather make sure I win this hand. Upping the ante to discuss these other issues dilutes our focus. Josh, when many wanted to up the ante on Social Security to talk about taxes or health care or economic security, you rightly kept us focused. This is a deadly serious issue, it appears we have the President and his closest advisors trapped, and it's time to stay the course.

We don't need to up the ante to make this an important issue. As Ed Kilgore says, this case involves

(a) a deputy White House chief of staff, and the president's acknowledged political guru, with enormous access to classified information; (b) a possible felony violation of federal law; (c) an act compromising our national security, and motivated by personal spite, as part of a larger coverup of information related to the invasion of Iraq; (d) a deliberate leak in an administration where leaking is a far worse sin than, say, gross incompetence in office

I would add one more: (e) an act that endangered not just one CIA operative but the lives of many other agents and informants who worked with her abroad. For the intelligence community, this is like an act of deliberate "friendly" fire.