Another thing struck me about the WaPo story you mention, Rich — the comedy of the notion that because there was an “S” in the paragraph that mentioned the name of “Valerie Wilson” (better known to us as Valerie Plame), this would have caused people to shudder, run and hide from the horror of exposing her name. Unless things have changed a lot since my days in government back in the 1980s, the use of the word “secret” is a little like saying “sssh.” It’s the least scary warning word in bureaucrat-ese. Nothing actually secret is marked “secret.” It’s comic how many things are stamped “secret,” so comic, in fact, that the late Pat Moyhihan was obsessed with getting the government to cut it out already. That said, of course nobody should leak anything marked “secret” — though for Washington’s leading newspaper to be essentially arguing such a case on the front page is even more comic than the excessive use of the word “secret.”
Everybody in government knows that things that are really secret are dubbed “code word” or something like that. Surely Walter Pincus, the knowledgeable reporter for the Washington Post, knows this to be true. The breathless quality of the story’s use of the word “secret” seems kind of disingenuous to me.
By the way, this continues to keep alive the possibility that the way the story got around Washington was through the chain of reporters following these matters. It’s not uncommon, though it ought to be, for friendly government officials to give reporters on long plane rides a quick read of some document — one of those habits that makes government officials seem so nice and friendly and open and honest and straightforward and beloved of certain reporters — and then take it back from them. Lets the journos feel like they’re in the know. Maybe this time they were more in the know than they now wish they had ever been.