PLUGGING A LEAK, OR TWO

President Bush says he will withhold comment until a special prosecutor completes his investigation into the release of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson’s name. For a criminal investigation, that’s fair enough, but the president should have a second concern over the fact that a reporter has named two senior members of the White House as sources for the leak. He should act on this concern.

This administration came into office promising an antidote to the hair-splitting, legalistic rhetoric of the Clinton White House. It would be forthright. It would state things plainly. It would demand a standard of ethics that would be widely understood and supported. Now it confronts a situation that demands the president apply these standards.

President Bush is right: The criminal investigation should be left up to the special prosecutor. An ethical investigation, however, should be his priority. Did his senior adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff Lewis Libby lead reporters to conclude or confirm for them that Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA agent? If so, they should not remain employed by the White House because to do so would be to protect irresponsible behavior.

The motive for leaking the information is now well known: Ms. Wilson is the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who strenuously doubted aspects of the Iraqi nuclear-weapons program, part of the Bush administration’s case for going to war against Saddam Hussein. Mr. Wilson had been sent to Niger, in West Africa, to check on documents purporting to show that Iraq was illegally importing uranium ore from there. The documents turned out to be forgeries, and Mr. Wilson was quite public about his views of the administration’s belief in them, an embarrassing turn for the administration.

Whether Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby or anyone else violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act won’t be known for months. The level of proof demanded by the act – that someone knowingly exposed the identity of an agent in order to do harm – would be difficult to prove, in any case. But the standard for the White House should be whether, first, senior officials knowingly revealed a covert agent and, second, whether this and other information was done to damage the reputation of an envoy who spoke his mind. According to a report by Time magazine reporter Mathew Cooper, Mr. Rove told him in 2003 information would soon be declassified to undermine Mr. Wilson’s credibility.

Credibility is all that a diplomat or an administration ultimately has. To lose it is to end a career badly. President Bush needn’t wait for the criminal investigation because his standard should not be merely whether there is criminal behavior in his administration.