* Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA operative who worked in the field of WMD counter-proliferation.
She may have been at one time but that was at least 7 years before this incident. The law against knowingly revealing a NOC applies to the previous 5 years.
*
After her husband published an editorial in The New York Times critical of the Bush Administration, Valerie Plame's name and her CIA affiliation were leaked to a number of news sources.
* It is not clear who told what to whom so this charge is too vague to be worth anything.
Right-wing hack Bob Novak published a column outing Valerie Plame and effectively ending her career.
Novak merely said that she worked at CIA, which was pretty much common knowledge. She was the wife of an ambassador with two children. She hadn't been a NOC for at least 7 years and she wasn't in hiding. Novak has said that he didn't even know she had ever been a NOC and he did not say she was in the article.
One of those who received the leak about Valerie Plame’s identity was Matt Cooper – his source: Karl Rove.
Karl Rove did not mention her name to Cooper. Also, as is now coming out, Novak told Rove. The real question is who told David Corn? *
By exposing her identity, Rove destroyed a valuable asset in the war on terror. But even worse than that, he potentially exposed and endangered a network of intelligence assets throughout the world that Plame had built painstakingly over an entire career.
Wrong. It was David Corn writing in the Nation that outed her as being covert and it was the Vanity Fair photo shoot that would have allowed people in other countries to put a face to the pseudonym she would have used in the field.
We will never know just how much damage Rove did, nor how many lives he ruined.
The only lives he has ruined are those of the Left wing nuts.
Cliff May's piece from today really lays all this out very well.