I'm writing this from DemocracyInAction's office at DuPont Circle, just a few blocks from where Chilean agents assassinated their country's ex-diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American assistant Ronni Moffitt 29 years ago.

Letelier had represented Chile's elected socialist Allende government before it was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup d'etat in 1973. America's trumped-up Strangelove Henry Kissinger gave a contemporaneous synopsis of Cold War diplomacy, remarking of Allende, "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people."

Chile spent two decades under a murderous dictatorship, and due in no small part to his machinations in the southern cone, Kissinger himself can no longer travel entirely free of the apprehension that some judge with a less subtle grasp than he of democratic freedom will call him to account as a war criminal for the copious gore on his hands.

There's a price to be paid for careless language and expedient bedfellows. Progressives who recently hopped into bed with the national security establishment the better to hound the neocons might be about to pay it for braying incautiously about Valerie Plame and "Treasongate": the same CIA that raised up Pinochet and waxed indignant over Plame has asked for an investigation into who leaked last week's dynamite Washington Post report on the CIA's clandestine global network of secret prisons.

Yes, there are differences. Yes, this is a conventional leak in the public interest, as opposed to Libby's more exotic species of dirty politics. Yes, both stories in their separate ways tend to confirm the decrepitude of the régime détestable. But some of the more intemperate and self-righteous intonations on the Plame affair would apply just as readily to pulling back the rug on a netherworld of shadow gulags, and some of the cannons Pat Fitzgerald is currently levelling on Scooter Libby might be within range of this target as well.

Does it really need reminding that, in the final analysis, Langley is no friend of ours?

(The leak apparently originated from a Republican Senator, which means this investigation is probably DOA. But the point remains. Think Daniel Ellsberg. Think Gary Webb.)

Update: Capitol Hill trade rag The Hill has this op-ed exploring other potential blowback from Democrats carelessly high-horsing the national security issue.