Shameful acts: why the wartime leaking has hurt.(Cover story)

ON December 20, after a speech in Boston, Sen. John Kerry was asked to comment on two leaks that have consumed Washington in recent months: the revelation that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to spy on the international phone calls of people with known al-Qaeda connections, and the leak of now-former CIA agent Valerie Wilson's identity. Which was more serious?

Wilson, Kerry answered. "The leak in the White House was an effort to destroy somebody and his family and attack them for telling the truth." The NSA leak, on the other hand, was an effort "to tell the truth about something that violates the rights of Americans and doesn't uphold our Constitution."

In the weeks since the New York Times first published the NSA story--and since, earlier, the Washington Post revealed the existence of "secret prisons" in Eastern Europe in which the United States held top terror suspects--Democrats like Kerry have argued that those leaks, which involved key elements of the U.S. War on Terror, were less damaging to national security than the Wilson matter. Republicans, on the other hand, have argued just the opposite, that the NSA and prison leaks were far more consequential to American national security than the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's identity.

Who's right? And just what damage has been done? Since all three cases involve classified information, it's impossible for an outsider to say definitively. But it is possible to piece together a ...