Yes..Let me say it better--this Act is ostensibly what the prosecutor is working on--there is no other to cover "outing of agent". But it is narrowly written and doesn't apparently apply to any of the facts in this case.
[quote]Intelligence Identities Protection Act that was supposedly violated in this case wasn't. The act establishes an extremely high standard for a criminal violation — the agent in question has to be undercover (Plame wasn't), and the leaker has to know she was undercover and be intentionally trying to undermine U.S. intelligence (very, very unlikely).[/quote] http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/2005/02/something_not_t.html
Victoria Toensig drafted this law. It was to deal with an exagent, Agee, who deliberately outed undercover CIA agents, placing them in danger. I know she has written an article explaining this and I urge you to Google it.
If that is where you got your info, then I think you're mistaken.
Plame was undercover at one point irrespective what this article in the National Review says. If she had not been, then do you think they would have convened a grand jury?
The question of whether it was intentional is a meritworthy point, but it depends on the assumption that whoever blabbed did not know that Plame was an operative. So why did he tell Novak that she was an operative, if he did not know?
Of course, Novak now says that the source did not use the term "operative", but Novak simply added that himself. If true, then the source is off the hook legally, and Novak is an idiot, and a very unlucky one at that since he apparently accidentally fingered Plame as an operative, and she by pure chance turned out to be one. But even if that's the case, it still was a huge misjudgment on the part of the source to even talk to Novak.
You can't sugar-coat this. There is a grand jury involved. At a minimum, whoever leaked the story created a huge embarrassment for the administration, and might have cost Bush the election. Fortunately, that did not happen, though.
Novak said that he talked to George Tenet to confirm the story, and Tenet said something like that he could not confirm that she was an "operative." OMG, what did Novak think he was going to say, "Yeah, she's an operative?" Since that's a violation of the law, he obviously would not say that, yet the fool Novak apparently concluded that Tenet's remarks were a confirmation.
I personally think that Tenet was the source, not Rove. Tenet should have said "Even if she were an operative, I couldn't tell you since it would be a felony. And you better not publish that article."
That's probably one of the big reasons that Tenet is no longer at the CIA.