A few weeks ago, I saw the movie Fair Game, detailing the exposure of Valerie Plame as an undercover operative for the CIA.
When that happened during the Bush Administration, they attempted to portray her as a mere secretary of no import. That wasn’t really the case. Her job was to help gather information while undercover in the Middle East.
Like most spy organizations, they gather little details from many sources and then pull it all together to get a full picture of various threats to national security around the world.
If this week, we were reading in the paper that a SPY had procured hundreds of thousands of documents and presented them to a handler for China or Iran, the country would be outraged. We would be calling it treason and suggesting they spend their life in prison at the very least.
Instead this week, we are watching major media outlets disperse that information provided to them by WikiLeaks (with the redactions that the MEDIA deemed important).
How exactly is WikiLeaks any different from a spy organization? For all these journalists know, there is one sentence in all those reports that confirms some key piece of information foreign intelligence organizations were waiting on.
I believe in the freedom of information to a point. I also respect whistle-blowers for having the courage to say that information is wrong like Watergate, WMDs in Iraq and even the original WikiLeak footage of Iraqi civilian deaths.
But just blindly accepting stolen documents from a spy and then passing them onto the media isn’t the same thing.
It’s not journalism. It’s facilitating treason.
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