Spy vs. Spy

Over at Why Now, a number of us wondered exactly why the U.S. rolled up a "spy" ring that, uhm, never did any actual spying. The folks arrested were at best unregistered agents of a foreign power -- a minor felony that carries a maximum of five years in prison and which more typically results in a fine and suspended sentence (see -- Billy Carter or Samir Vincent). The FBI had them all identified, and could have sat there watching them for years to find out who the real spies were.

So why roll them up? We speculated on a number of things -- Obama's need to distract people from his disastrous mismanagement of the Gulf oil gusher, the FBI wanting a bigger budget for their counterespionage branch, etc. But today I think we know the real reason: a spy swap, where we give them some of their spies back, and they give us some of our spies back. This is the sort of thing we haven't seen in decades, not since the fall of the Soviet Union, but used to happen all the time back then. I guess we're back to the future again... alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin