[quote]biltritewave wrote:
she was also not undercover so there is no crime.
[/quote]
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/07/25/rove.problem.tm.tm/index.html
[i]CIA sources say Plame held highly sensitive jobs during the past two decades. In the late 1990s she was serving as an NOC, working as an analyst with Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a CIA front company that has been shut down. “She was pretty and had brains and ambition and loyalty,” says a former clandestine officer who worked with her. “Everything was there.” But in 1997 she moved back to Washington. The New York Times has reported that the CIA feared that her cover had been blown to the Russians by double agent Aldrich Ames. Her marriage to a high-profile former diplomat further limited her ability to fly under the radar.
She began working at CIA headquarters in Langley, assigned to the directorate of operations, the CIA’S clandestine branch that manages its human spying overseas and is one of the agency’s most secretive directorates. “NOCs aren’t supposed to come into the building,” said Fred Rustmann, a former senior CIA official and a Plame superior. “It doesn’t serve cover well. It may serve the moment. They break the rules for expediency. In Valerie’s case, she’s a bright young woman. She has some experience in nuclear proliferation.”
Thus Rove’s defenders have claimed that he can hardly be guilty of outing a spy who was effectively outed already. “She was done,” says a senior Republican Senate aide when asked whether Plame’s career had been damaged by the disclosure of her covert identity. “She’d had her two kids. She’d come back to headquarters. And how do you maintain your cover when your husband is saying, I was sent on a mission by the CIA?”
But while she may no longer have been a clandestine operative, she was still under protected status. A U.S. official told TIME that Plame was indeed considered covert for the purposes of the Intelligence Identities Protection law. And even if the leak was not illegal, intelligence officials argue, it is not defensible. “I’m beyond disgusted,” a CIA official said last week. I am especially angry about the b_______ explanations that she is not a covert agent. That is an official status, and there are lots of people in this building who are on that status. It’s not up to the Republican Party to determine when that status will end for an agent."[/i]
I have a feeling that if someone in the Clinton White House had done this, Rush and the Republican talking heads would be throwing the term treason around alot and saying that whomever did it should be hung for the offense.