I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHEN MENTIONING VALERIE PLAME — WHO WAS NEITHER UNDERCOVER NOR AN AGENT — WAS TREASON OF THE FIRST ORDER: New York Times defends decision to identify undercover CIA agent.

The New York Times on Friday published the name of what is believed to be an undercover CIA agent leading U.S. operations related to Iran, and defended the move by saying the agent’s name had been published before.

The report said that Michael D’Andrea was recently named as the chief of Iran operations and described him as having the most responsibility in “weakening al Qaeda.”

Major publications typically do not reveal the identities of undercover agents, but the Times reasoned that it was fair to name D’Andrea because “his identity was previously published in news reports, and he is leading an important new administration initiative against Iran.”

The conservative Federalist website took exception with the second half of that. “So the Times has apparently made it the newspaper’s mission to make the agency’s work much more difficult and far more dangerous by publicly identifying the man in charge of its covert operations in the Persian country,” the group said.

The rules are always different this time.