Here ya go, for all those who need to be spoon-fed the truth:
Plame's Identity was NO secret! Worked for the CIA - yes, covert Agent - No! Although classified 'secret', to be a crime, the name had to be leaked intentionally/on purpose with intent, which is why Kerry is NOT doing time for exposing the REAL covert CIA agent during the Bolton inquisition.
Agent? Si; Secret? No!
Moreover, as Novak himself notes, Plame’s “covert” status “was not much of a secret.” The incidentals were not secret: Her name appears in Joseph Wilson’s “Who’s Who in America” entry. Moreover, when she donation $1,000 to Al Gore, she did so under her married name, also listing a private CIA front group as her “employer.”
More importantly, though, her CIA employment itself was no secret. Wilson himself disclosed that his wife let her cover slip around him early in their dating life. Presumably Ms. Plame has dated others, whom she also informed of her dreadfully well-guarded, super-duper-secret status in exchange for, say, an evening at the Ice Capades. Although she has a desk job investigating those who sell WMDs to terrorists (and is not a field “operative” as some misunderstood Novak to imply), she had knowledge of genuine field agents in hostile lands. Thus, her loose-lipped dating-and-mating habits could have endangered those within her orbit. Her blatant disregard of CIA secrecy undermined her own job. It seems she, not Bob Novak, was the graver danger to national security.
For that matter, Novak was not even the only prominent conservative columnist to know of Plame’s employment. Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has written that by early July, when Wilson first threw his tantrums about his Niger expedition, May had heard of Plame’s status “from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhanded manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.” Novak seems right on target when he writes, “It was well known around Washington that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.” Had Novak not reported her employment, this ticking time bomb was still waiting to go off.
This hardly excuses the blasé attitude of two senior administration officials toward the identity of covert CIA analysts. Regardless of her own attitude toward her covert status and the fact that she is a desk jockey rather than a field guerrilla, the CIA certifies that it will uphold its part of the bargain to maintain the anonymity of its undercover officers. Leaking any covert CIA agent’s name to the press should be intolerable, and the perpetrators, if found, should be punished. In fact everyone from President Bush to Attorney General Ashcroft shares this consensus.
Since the story broke, Wilson has played it for all its worth, publicly demanding the arrest of Karl Rove (though he could produce no proof that Rove was one of Novak’s unnamed sources and later withdrew his comment). Leaning upon his own infallibility, Wilson has insisted the Bush administration is lying about yellowcake, hardly a move that will inspire confidence in a wartime leader (and, as noted above, entirely unwarranted). The mass media has also proven pliable, demanding George Bush “do more” in his investigation.Yet it seems there is precious little Bush can do to find the leaks (which he is eager to do, after the embarrassment they have caused him).
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=10694
