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Originally Posted by Binary_Digit  The United States never publicly acknowledged or revealed Plame's CIA status. The leak to Cuba was not a public acknowledgment at all. |
Again that is completely irrelevant. Furthermore; if you falsely believe that section 422 hinges on it being public knowledge then guess what? Wilson and Armitage were both members of the U.S. government and they did make it public knowledge when they talked to the press.
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Would you be okay with nuclear secrets being leaked to Iran even though the same secrets were leaked to China years ago??
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This isn't about nuclear secrets the legal case in question refers specifically to under cover intel operatives.
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That's where you're wrong. If it were public knowledge like it is today then you'd have a point, but it was not public knowledge.
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Again that is irrelevant, but again even if that were the case it became public knowledge when Wilson and Armitage started telling it to the press.
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| Her employment at the CIA was classified. She had been covert in the last 5 years. The CIA was taking specific steps to conceal her identity. |
Irrelevant her name was already divulged first by the CIA, then by Wilson, and then finally by Armitage, thus no crime.
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It was against the law to reveal her name and employment at the CIA.
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Not according to section 422 of U.S. Code Title 50, because her name had already been revealed prior to the Novak article.
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Her CIA status was classified when Novak's article came out, and nothing you say can ever change that. It's really that simple. |
It really isn't, because no crime could have occurred since that information was already leaked before the Novak article came out, the public is not the concern here the concern is hostile foreign governments like the one in Cuba finding out about the identities of covert agents, so to assert that Section 422 applies to only the American public and not to foreign governments is quite frankly ridiculous..
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It's completely relevant, how can you say it's not? It says right there in section 422 that if the United States publicly acknowledged or revealed the information then that is a defense against leaking.
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A COMPLETE DEFENSE?
The defense in Section 422 requires that the revelation by the United States have been done "publicly." At least one U.S. official who spoke to Gertz speculated that because the Havana snafu was not "publicized" — i.e., because the classified information about Plame was mistakenly communicated to Cuba rather than broadcast to the general public — it would not available as a defense to whomever spoke with Novak. But that seems clearly wrong.
First, the theory under which the media have gleefully pursued Rove, among other Bush officials, holds that if a disclosure offense was committed here it was complete at the moment the leak was made to Novak. Whether Novak then proceeded to report the leak to the general public is beside the point — the violation supposedly lies in identifying Plame to Novak. (Indeed, it has frequently been observed that Judy Miller of the Times is in contempt for protecting one or more sources even though she never wrote an article about Plame.)
Perhaps more significantly, the whole point of discouraging public disclosure of covert agents is to prevent America's enemies from degrading our national security. It is not, after all, the public we are worried about. Rather, it is the likes of Fidel Castro and his regime who pose a threat to Valerie Plame and her network of U.S. intelligence relationships. The government must still be said to have "publicized" the classified relationship — i.e., to have blown the cover of an intelligence agent — if it leaves out the middleman by communicating directly with an enemy government rather than indirectly through a media outlet.
Andrew C. McCarthy on Valerie Plame on National Review Online |
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I agree with most of that. All except for "(which it doesn't)" and I think I covered why.
The point of this "spectacle" was to find out who leaked classified information to the press. Armitage is off the hook because he didn't realize Plame was covert. He saw her name on paperwork that doesn't normally contain such information and he made the wrong assumption about that.
A crime was committed, which exposed a covert CIA agent and the entire front company that she worked for.
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But you just said that Armitage was off the hook because he didn't know she was covert, so even if you are asserting that the CIA's inadvertent disclosure doesn't count because it wasn't disclosed to the American public then you must admit that it did become public knowledge as soon as Armitage talked to Novak, but since Armitage is off the hook then where is the crime and who committed it?