Condensed Answer:

SACOM did good investigative work to break a legitimate story. The Agonist did wrong. He took content that required subscriber access, and he stole it entire in ways that go way beyond fair use. The directly wronged party settled. Unfortunately, he wasn't 100% forthcoming about that wrongdoing from the moment the issue was raised. He is paying for that, as he should, and he will continue to do so. That's all beyond debate.

I can't, however, make myself believe the argument that his conduct harmed Winds of Change.NET or other blogs, for reason I'll explain below. Finally, though wrong his conduct once the issue arose retained some redeeming features. So he is not, to me, completely beyond the pale. If you have trouble with this part, you'll want to read the longer explanations and make up your mind then.

Finally, Sean-Paul transparently credits all of his sources 100% now, so the credibility of his news posts can't be an issue. I read him because his work remains some of the best in the blogosphere, without Stratfor. When I do find information there that I want to share with my readers, the same honesty demanded of The Agonist demands that I acknowledge where it came from. After all, isn't failing to do that what he got in trouble for?

The Complete Answer:

Let's start with the easy part. First, good investigative work by Strategic Armchair Command on a valid story. Credit, too, for sticking to his guns until that story was heard and expanded upon via WIRED et. al.

Regarding The Agonist, what he did was wrong. There's no question of that, it was copyrighted material. Worse, it was not Stratfor's public information, it was subscribers-only. Coming clean immediately would have saved him all of this heartache, but as WIRED makes clear he didn't do that. That "little birdie" stuff was at least as wrong as the original offense. He took a big and well-deserved hit for that in the blogosphere, and he will continue to pay the price.

So, that isn't up for argument. Now, what about the argument saying it doesn't matter that Stratfor is satisfied, because he ripped off other bloggers by depriving them of readers? Well, it sure would be comforting to believe that the Stratfor material was the reason Sean-Paul had wartime traffic of 50,000+ visitors or so per day and we had 5,000. But I can't.

I've thought about this a lot. My conclusion: The Agonist's rise owes more to his political positioning than his sources.

Think about it. He was the only 24/7 Iraq warblogger with leftie credentials, which means a large portion of the blogosphere automatically trusted him more than they would ever trust, say, Blogs of War - or even Winds of Change.NET. That positioning helps with the media, too, who will know of leftie bloggers if the know anyone; after all, that's who their referral network is. It's also who they see as credible, other than blogs by military personnel themselves. Put all that together, and the effect is not small. Especially when we add a chaos theory concept called "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" (a.k.a. "The Butterfly Effect"), which says that small differences at the beginning of important state-changes can add up to very big differences later.

The beginning of Gulf War II was absolutely a state-change for the entire blogosphere - and Sean-Paul was perfectly positioned to ride that from minute one. He did.

So Stratfor's stuff did play a role, but the it was a second or even third-tier role at best. Depressingly, the relative results would have been similar with or without Stratfor's material.

Had Sean-Paul been utterly recalcitrant and decided on complete "Baghdad Bob" denial throughout, however, none of the above would matter; I would indeed shun him. No, he was not fully honest. The WIRED story makes that clear, in ways the SACOM post did not. I give him half-points, however, for linking to the expose from Strategic Armchair Command on the same day it was published, well before the WIRED article. His response was wrong and contributed to his problems, but I'll give him one cheer for not ignoring or hiding his critic's point of view. Indeed, given his traffic he probably did more than anyone else to make it widely known. The Agonist also settled with Stratfor, who benefitted in the end from the incident. Sean-Paul has since followed up with a posting asking his readers not to harass SACOM (can't link it, his archives have about 3 days of stuff in a mangled state but it was there), and also with a full apology.

Some courage and sense of decency, plus growing public recognition of the depth of his wrongdoing, do not excuse or cancel out either theft or verified untruths. To me, however, complete shunning is for the irredeemable - and he doesn't fall into that category.

Still, I'm more careful now. Anyone would be, and that will hurt him on blogrolls because they're an implicit endorsement. The tendency to call his intellectual honesty into question will also hurt him when he tries to make analytical posts. His news sources, on the other hand, are guaranteed legitimate because he's 100% transparent and up front about them in every post now. So their credibility isn't an issue. He still finds material others do not, and it's all on his own efforts. That alone makes reading his materials worth my time.

Having read him, wouldn't witholding legitimately sourced and interesting items just because he referenced them be a disservice to my readers? Sure doesn't sound like a great idea to me. Nor can I pass information on to them without saying truthfully where I got it. Isn't that exactly what The Agonist got in trouble for? Which is why I will continue to link the Agonist in my posts when I find items through his site.

I'll leave it up to others to decide how they want to handle this on their posts, of course, or their own blogs. But you all deserve to know my policy, and my reasons. Thank you very much for your readership, and for your implicit trust in the team here at Winds of Change.NET.