Actually, NOB has a point. The statute cited does not address motive per se; however, it does make clear that revealing the identity of a covert agent is a mens rea crime. But the language of the statute is pretty clear; in order to be guilty of violating it, a person must (1) have had authorized access to classified information identifying the covert agent, (2) knowingly disclose this information to someone who's not supposed to know, (3) know that the information identifies a covert agent, and (4) that the covert agent is in fact covert. The law applies to people who have security clearances and is meant to prevent blowing the cover of covert ops as a means of playing politics. It's absolutely inapplicable in this instance.

The ACLU did the right thing in this example and was well within both the letter and the spirit of the law.

Not sure if anyone's addressed this yet, so if so, apologies for the redundancy. As far as I know, there's no statutory prohibition to the CIA operating in the US. The CIA "lacks" domestic powers insofar as spying on people in the US would violate US law; as a spy agency, they're unaccustomed to working within the This didn't necessarily stop them, of course, but when the CIA was established, J. Edgar Hoover already had a powerful domestic counterintelligence apparatus built in his FBI (and it was his FBI). A "gentleman's agreement" was entered into between the FBI and the CIA which reserved domestic intelligence-gathering to the CIA. It probably didn't long outlast Hoover's death.

You think that just because someone isn't a US Citizen, they have no rights? You seem to be confused, my friend. There are numerous treaties and conventions to which the US is a party that dictate how we're allowed to treat them. Furthermore, KSM traveled to the United States during the plotting of 9/11, and this means that he committed a crime on US Soil, making him subject to US criminal jurisdiction (the US Constitution is pretty explicit about this, see Article III Section 2, "The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority....Trial of all Crimes...shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed."); even if he hadn't been here, I'm not sure anyone would really argue with us if we wanted jurisdiction because the crime which he is accused of masterminding occurred in the US. That answer your question?

Salon's comment code strikes again.

Dare I suggest that those essential similarities you see are the product of our social environment and of certain essential features of human psychology which are shaped and certain aspects emphasized by that environment? We live in a society which is greatly stratified by wealth, in which a small minority of the population are allowed to live lives of leisure and comfort and enjoy the fruits of everyone else's labor, and in which precisely this lifestyle is held up as being the be-all, end-all of our existence. We are encouraged to identify with, to study and emulate, the "rich and famous" that we may ourselves become more successful like them. No one can escape this influence.

It is also not without reason that people view "left-wing extremists" with as much fear and consternation as "right-wing extremists" (the difficulty being the latter are harder to spot in a society in which the dominant ideology is well right of what most of the rest of the world would consider center). Nietzsche warned that "[h]e who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster." Although of course to equate the two is a mistake, as you observe there are certain similarities.

Finally, given the long history of social engineering on the part of the authoritarians, some amount of authoritarianism will inevitably persist even among the most enlightened of us for the reasons cited above. We quite simply have too much difficulty looking at the world in any other way under present circumstances, or those which can be reasonably projected to prevail in the foreseeable future, to rid ourselves of it. It's too much a part of our social fabric.