Ravi,
You may be correct that Cockburn can occasionally be off-handed in his condemnations, but often with good cause. But understand he is basically a polemicist.
I think that one should make a distinction between exposing the hypocrisy of the current regime and defending the law that protects the ruling class as a whole. In my view Cockburn is basically correct. Not enough leftists took the opportunity to expose the "Intelligence Identities Protection Act", which is the underlying law that led to Scooter Libby's cover-up. The more intelligence agents exposed, especially CIA agents, the better for the world.
I wrote the following in November 2005, after the first confirmed reports of CIA prisons.
_"The Rule of Law" and Secrecy: CIA Prisons and the Plame Affair_ http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/32298.html
An excerpt:
"Let me make a thematic connection between the Valerie Plame Affair and the CIA archipelago of secret prisons. Let us be clear: The law that gave Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald a mandate to investigate the Valerie Plame Affair is an anti-democratic law meant to protect the national security state against exposures of its 'secret' atrocities. The law is known as Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) and it was passed in order to protect the criminals at the CIA from exposure. The secrecy of CIA operations is aimed at the domestic population. We are the ones who are not supposed to know the history of subversion of democratic movements of our government. The CIA is not simply an intelligence organization it is also an organization that bribes foreign officials, undermines foreign elections, overthrows foreign governments, fosters foreign secret security agencies and trains them in torture and death-squad operations - in short the CIA is an organization meant to inspire fear in foreign civilian peoples through the use of violence and propaganda. In short, by definition, the CIA is engaged in terrorism. Exposing the CIA, its operations and its operatives is a democratic duty that we must fight to make a 'right.' The Intelligence Identities Protection Act was passed in the early 1980s and was aimed at Philip Agee and the Covert Action Information Bulletin (CAIB). Agee made his own separate peace by defecting from the CIA to the multitude. He published CIA Diary: Inside the Company in 1975 and soon after teamed up to publish CAIB. In both his book and in CAIB he exposed CIA operations and operatives. It was Agee's and CAIB's civic activism in exposing CIA secrets that led to the passage of IIPA. The activities exposed by Agee were largely illegal activities which are condemned (with much usual nation-state hypocrisy) by international norms. Agee, no matter what his motivations, was a whistle blower and IIPA is an anti-Whistle Blower law that will be used mainly against the left. In the usual misapplication of the rule of law those who harm the ruling class will be prosecuted and those who benefit the ruling class will not be prosecuted under this law.
"Which brings us back to the CIA run secret prisons.
"If a CIA agent with a conscience knows where these prisons are located, if she knows the CIA operatives who run those prisons, if she knows the conditions of those prisons and the names of the people in the prisons, if she then reports on the activities of the CIA wardens and their hirelings who run these prisons, and if this person of conscience exposes all of the above, I would celebrate such a person. In my mind she should be considered a courageous fighter for democratic openness. The law that would put such a person in jail should be repealed. All secret security agencies should be exposed to the light of day.
"This is not a mere hypothetical. Think of Dana Priest's article exposing the CIA secret prisons. She wrote it without naming names. But she must have sources somewhere in order to write the article in the first place and those sources must know names. The names of the people running those secret CIA prisons are engaging in crimes against humanity and the names of the CIA prison wardens and their accomplices should be exposed to democratic sunlight. Perhaps one reason that they are not so exposed is the threat of jail under Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
"I am cynical enough to hope that despicable hypocrites, such as Carl Rove and Scooter Libby, will betray the norms of their class and expose covert agents, even if they do so only to further their very narrow political interests. In the end, if the Intelligence Identities Protection Act is consistently violated by those who rule this country, perhaps the act will become a dead letter. This is a mere modest proposal in favor of ruling class wolves eating their own puppies. In reality only an active and organized radical democratic left, which has its own organizations willing to expose the crimes and atrocities of the U.S. government and its secret agencies can put some content into the notion of the "rule of law" and someday make such notions of law into a flexible instrument of pragmatic democratic justice."
Jerry Monaco