Bloggers on Booman Tribune and Daily Kos as well as elsewhere have rightly made a great deal of the Bush administrations’s revealing that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent. But diaries in the past few days have shown up some sheer hypocrisy of many in criticising the journalists involved in this.
There are obvious reasons for the US to have laws against the identification of CIA agents. For a start, it negates their usefulness in the field but there is a far more pressing reason for doing so. By revealing their identity, some agents could be placed at risk of their lives while working in the field. Rightly, many have taken up the case of Plame’s exposure apparently by a senior Bush official as a cause celebre.
Yet the same bloggers who have revelled in the discomfort or right-wing journalists seem to have no problem with showing pictures of the two SAS soldiers doing undercover work in Basra who were captured by Iraqi police. I believe I was the only one to point out that the UK media pixillate out the faces of anybody involved in the special forces and strongly hinted that this was the reason for the MoD’s request rather than the stated position that it was to protect their families. I would suggest that protection of their identify for their physical safety in future operations is even more pressing than that for Ms Plame.
Clearly those bearing the most blame are those agencies which have carried the pictures and footage released by the Iraqi police. Since it very soon became obvious that this organisation has been infiltrated by some of the militia or their sympathisers, should not they have questioned whether to publish the pictures in a clear form? Nevertheless, I believe I am the first to raise this question in relation to their dissemination in various diaries.
This does of course raise questions of to what extent self-censorship should be exercised by the blogging community. This undeniably happens. Where for example are the uncensored picures of the contractors’ burnt bodies hanging from the bridge in Hallabja? There is a case for such restraint. As far as I am aware, no UK media have published the pictures from Basra of the British soldier in flames jumping from his Warrior APC. Censorship or not wishing to give succor to the right wing who would be demanding oppressive action against the whole civilian population, when the numbers involved in the protest were maybe 0.1% or less of the people in the city?
