Ethics in Gov

Dictionary.com defines ethics as, "that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions" (2007). Some people may consider the actions they take as being good and the motives behind the same action as being right. The actions taken by various Bush administration officials concerning the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame could be considered by some people as unethical, yet the officials who leaked that information may see it as being right since it was not stated as being illegal. The 1982 law that the CIA said was broken states:

To be considered a violation of the law, a disclosure by a government official must have been deliberate, the person doing it must have known that the CIA officer was a covert agent, and he or she must have known that the government was actively concealing the covert agent's identity. (White, 2005)

Without concrete evidence, proving an act was deliberate is difficult. A few government officials who were involved in the incident and the subsequent investigation include, Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer, and the only administration official charged and convicted of offenses relating to the investigation, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. These men were not charged with leaking Plame's identity, but their actions could be taken as being unethical by many people.

In February 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about British reports that Saddam Hussein’s government had purchased large quantities of uranium ore. The CIA’s Directorate of Operations, Counterproliferation Division then setup a trip to Niger to investigate these claims. They chose former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to head the fact finding mission. Eight days later, Wilson returned from his trip and reported that the intelligence was “bogus and unrealistic” (Frank, 2003). The agency sent a summary of the trip to the White House on March 9, 2002. Almost a year later on January 23, 2003, President Bush made his State of the Union Address to the nation. In this address, he reported that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction and that they were buying uranium ore from Niger. President Bush reported this to the nation even though there was no proof. Then, on March 8, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, tells U. N. Security Council that the allegations against Iraq where false. However, this made no difference to the White House. The United States attacked Iraq on March 20, 2003. (Frank, 2003)

After months of debate over the findings of Mr. Wilson’s trip in 2002, senior officials from the White House released the story of the trip and findings to the Washington Post without disclosing Mr. Wilson’s name. In the July 6, 2003 edition of the New York Times, Wilson published an article criticizing the administration and accusing them of twisting facts to falsely exaggerate the Iraqi threat. In this piece Mr. Wilson wrote, “If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand. If the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses” (Wilson, 2003). Almost two weeks later on July 14, 2003, conservative columnist Bob Novak exposed Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame in his column as the person responsible for sending Wilson to Niger. Plame was an undercover operative in the CIA’s Counterproliferation division who specialized in weapons of mass destruction. According to Novak’s column, Valerie Plame suggested to CIA officials to send her husband to Niger back in 2002 (Frank, 2003). By exposing the identity of Plame, her life and the lives of those she worked with were put in danger. She was now no longer able to work as an undercover agent. This revelation prompted the CIA to ask the Justice Department to begin an investigation into who in the White House may have leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent.

Soon after Wilson’s article in the New York Times, Karl Rove spoke with various journalists about the trip to Niger and Wilson’s report. When contacted by Novak concerning the article he was writing, Rove told him that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA and had a role in her husband being chosen for the trip (Waas, 2006). In his interview with Newsday on July 22, 2003, eight days after the publication of his column, Novak stated that he did not go looking for the information pertaining to Valerie Plame. Novak said in the interview that the administration officials that were his sources encouraged him to write about Plame’s involvement. He said, “I didn't dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it" (Phelps, Royce, 2003). Novak said in the interview that one of the