Why are there so many traitors?

The wingnut community, encouraged by the Bush administration, is now beside itself with anger over the spate of high-profile stories about classified government programs that have appeared in the major newspapers over the past year. Any number of right-wing pundits, politicians, and bloggers have called for the prosecution of not only the officials who served as sources for the stories, but the newspapers and reporters themselves. Indeed, it is hard to think of a issue that has more unified and galvanized the right-wing noise machine in recent memory than this one.

Yet despite the countless lines of text and hours of commentary devoted to this subject by the Bush administration's army of apologists, there is one question that they never seem to address: why are there suddenly so many traitors?

If you look closely at the major news stories that have drawn the ire of this crowd--the NSA surveillance story, the CIA torture prisons story, the banking records story--you'll notice that they all have one thing in common. They are all incredibly well sourced. Each of these stories cites almost a dozen sources, if not more, including both current and former government officials and officials from all three branches of government.

So despite the very real possibility of criminal prosecution and loss of employment, sources are practically tripping over each other to talk to journalists about classified programs. Why is that? Why has "treason" suddenly reached epidemic levels? To the Michelle Malkins of the world, the answer to this question no doubt involves some sort nefarious partisan conspiracy between the "MSM" and a liberal fifth column within the intelligence community.

But Andrew Sullivan is probably a little closer to the mark:

It's not that hard to be a journalist in Washington right now.
Just sit there and countless troubled, angered and
concerned soldiers, CIA agents, State Department officials
will track you down and tell you how out-of-control the
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld clique has become. This isn't just
sad; it's dangerous. The Bush policy of seizing power from
Congress and the courts, breaking the law, violating treaty
obligations and ignoring the settled procedures for
intelligence-gathering and detainee treatment has actually
led to more leaks and less secrecy than if they had played
by the rules. Once again, the rank arrogance of these
people, which is connected in many cases with rank
incompetence, has made us less, rather than more, secure.
And it has forced many loyal competent concerned
government professionals into releasing secrets they would
have kept under a more rational and law-abiding executive.

That strikes me as exactly right. The suggestion that these career government officials are driven by a desire to personally harm the President at the expense of our national security is transparently stupid and deeply paranoid.

The fact is that this administration has chosen to depart from a number of long-established and widely-shared legal and moral understandings. That has, understandably, generated a lot of concern among officials who believe these departures are ill-advised and unjustifiable, either legally or morally. The amount of classified leaking we see in any particular administration is almost certainly correlated with that administration's willingness to push the legal and moral envelope. This is especially true if it chooses to do so in secret.

I don't wish to oversimplify this issue. The leaking of classified information raises a number of difficult legal and ethical questions. But if the Bush administration is so concerned with leaking, it might want to try being a little less cavalier when it comes to legal and ethical norms that have served our country well throughout its storied history.