Where's the Lefty Outrage Over Outing CIA Ops Now?

During the Valerie Plame scandal, the left acted as if there was no greater sin than disclosing the name of a CIA operative. But there is no such outrage at current initiatives that could potentially disclose the names of several agency officers, writes Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal. Eric Holder’s probe into detainee abuse is bound to make the accused operatives’ names a part of the public record through leaks to the press.

Even more outrageously, the ACLU’s John Adams Project has taken photos of officers, sometimes “surreptitiously outside the officers’ homes,” and provided them to the lawyers of top al-Qaeda detainees, notes Stephens. "Liberals have never liked the CIA, except when it suited their partisan purposes," he notes. But their current "enthusiasm for this new round of outing is a bit unseemly—specially when lives are actually at stake." (More CIA stories.)