It's hard to remember his description of being tortured in a Turkish cell for his labor activism and not think of all the other labor leaders around the world who the CIA helped torture or murder, often with the active collaboration of the AFL-CIO leadership during the Cold War.   Not that many CIA officials no doubt acted honorably in their bailiwicks, but too many were part of the worst tendencies of American foreign policy.

Possibly the most significant failure of the US labor movement in the post-war era was its lack of solidarity with workers movements around the world, instead preferring a patriotic collaboration with the US national security state to ward off accusations of Communist sympathy.  This was a short-term strategy that paid off with short-term returns for American workers, until corporate America decided it no longer had need for a junior partner in international affairs and turned on the labor movement with a vengeance in the 1970s and 1980s.

One of the great changes Sweeney made in coming into office was firing most of the old "AFL-CIA hands" and creating a new international center for labor organizing, which is now just beginning to help build the international solidarity it should have decades earlier. (See this article for more)

The Plame Affair and a chest-thumping defense of the sanctity of CIA secrecy has the danger of being seized on by progressives today as a talisman of their own War-On-Terrorism patriotism, much as the old AFL-CIO seized on its CIA ties to prove its anti-communism.  Even as we know secret agencies are helping coordinate kidnapping, "renditions" and torture around the world, I just can't join in a florid dense of the sanctity of the CIA's secrets. 

Again, the exposure of Plame is to be condemned, but because the political motivations were tainted and the purpose was to perpetuate lies on behalf of a ruinous war.   The lives of covert agents are to be valued, but no more and no less than any other lives sacrificed by the political cynicism of this administration.

The 1982 law which we are debating so fervently was, at least partially, designed to protect the identity of those assisting dictorships and helping to torture labor activists like those in Turkey.  It might be sweet irony to see the Bush administration pilloried on these rightwing security state rules, but I can't with a straight face make violating that law the core sin by which to judge the administration.  

The crime here is the lies told to sell the Iraq War, the deaths and chaos that resulted, and the hatred around the world our actions have engendered.  It might not be as cleancut a case as a nice legal indictment, but it's the principled argument to make and it's a solider base for long-term progressive organizing, both at home and abroad.