I dunno. What exactly did Novak do that was so wrong? What law did he break? He reported some gossipy tidbit of news, and refused to reveal his sources. Journalistic privilege, public has a right to know, yadda yadda.

And if it turns out he got it wrong, that's still no worse than all the others. Hell, Dan Rather practically got it wrong on purpose. He went out of his way to be misled.

Come to think of it, [link|http://slate.msn.com/id/2089249/|why are any of them criminally liable?] Near as I can tell, Plame wasn't all that important. We're not talking some deep cover operative in the bowels of the Kremlin here.

And, lest we forget, this was supposedly all about Joe Wilson, for telling the truth about the Niger uranium. But we later learned he had contradicted himself on that same issue. So what's this all about now?

(But it certainly seems to be winding down, and rightly so.)

[link|http://slate.msn.com/id/2089249/|Read it again, more carefully]

Excerpt:

The problem with the Intelligence Identities Protection Act is that it doesn't appear to apply to the Novak case. To win a conviction, the law requires, among other things:

1) That the individual has or had "authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent." If Novak's administration sources had only unauthorized access to the information about covert officer Plame, learning about her identity and her mission, say, in a hallway conversation from a visiting CIA officer, the law wouldn't apply here. Perhaps they might go after the hypothetical CIA officer, but they'd run in to a slew of other legal problems sketched out below.

2) That in addition to having had authorized access to the information about the covert agent, the individual must have "intentionally" disclosed it to an individual not authorized to receive classified information. This clause protects the government employee or member of Congress who might accidentally blurt out the name and identity of a covert agent. (In 1991, Sen. David Boren, D-Okla., mentioned the name of a CIA station chief as he emerged from a closed-door session.) So, in addition to the other tests, a prosecutor would also have to prove the leaker's intent to blow the agent's cover. This poses a huge problem in the Novak case because the vague language of his column doesn't identify Plame as covert, but as a "CIA operative on weapons of mass destruction." It's plausible that Novak's source didn't know\ufffdas we now know\ufffdthat Plame was "undercover."

3) That the individual knew he was disclosing information that identifies a "covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States." [Emphasis added.] So far, we have no evidence that the United States is taking "affirmative measures" to protect Plame's identity. Anecdotal stories in the press indicate that she's raising 3-year-old twins. The government would have to prove it was actively protecting her identity for a future assignment. This could mean keeping her name out of CIA phone directories; giving her an office off the Langley, Va., campus of the CIA; etc. But Clifford May and others say Plame's identity was well known in some Washington circles. That could argue that the agency wasn't taking affirmative measures to conceal her identity. Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd this week that she surrendered her secret identity to him somewhere around the time of their first kiss! If Plame's been sloppy with her identity, should somebody go to jail for leaking it? Last, the individual would have to know the government was taking affirmative measures to protect her identity. If he didn't know that, he'd be free from prosecution.

But what about Robert Novak? The law leaves him in the clear, too, unless he starts routinely disclosing covert agents' identities with the intent to harm U.S. intelligence-gathering capabilities, as the Agee crowd did.