L.A. Times Publishes Personal Details About Covert CIA Agents
Patterico (H/T: Michelle Malkin)

James Taranto reports on an article in the Los Angeles Times which provides extensive detail about CIA covert agents:

The Los Angeles Times boasts that it has identified three CIA pilots who are facing kidnapping charges in Germany over a 2003 counterterrorism operation there:

The names they used were all aliases, but The Times confirmed their real identities from government databases and visited their homes this month after a German court in January ordered the arrest of the three “ghost pilots” and 10 other alleged members of the CIA’s special renditions unit on charges of kidnapping and causing serious bodily harm to Khaled Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, three years ago.

None of the pilots responded to repeated requests for comment left with family members and on their home telephones. The Times is not publishing their real names because they have been charged only under their aliases.

But it does offer plenty of details about them: ...

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An Outing In My Neck of the Woods
Lorie Byrd

James Taranto points to an "outing" by the L.A. Times in my neck of the woods (North Carolina) and makes a comparison to the Plame case. I agree with Taranto, and with Clarice Feldman, who has been covering the trial of Scooter Libby (here and here), that this case in the L.A. Times about three pilots flying CIA rendition flights who have been indicted in a German court is a real outing. Their real names were not disclosed, but they might as well have been.

[...]

I am familiar enough with this part of North Carolina to know that it would not take a genius to locate these men (particularly the third pilot) and their families. These men were using aliases for a reason. The L.A. Times did not provide Google Maps to their homes, but they did give anyone who wanted to track these men down, a real jump on locating them. ...