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 Jos ...