The fact that right-wing critics are leaping to Karl Rove’s defense is not surprising. The lengths to which they’re going to make things up is.
The two myths I’ve seen the most often are the idea that Valerie Plame was not really an undercover CIA agent and that identifying Plame is legally permissible so long as the White House hacks didn’t literally mention her name. Both of these claims are ridiculous.
First, the literal use of Plame’s name during the White House leak is irrelevant. This is the law:
Whoever, as a result of having authorized access to classified information, learns the identity of a covert agent and intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent’s intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined not more than $25,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. [50 USC 421(b)] (emphasis added)
Second, as Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and counter-terrorism official at the State Department (who’s been emphasizing the seriousness of this scandal for quite a while), explained at TPM Café, Plame really was an undercover CIA agent.
…Valerie Plame was an undercover operations officer until outed in the press by Robert Novak. Novak’s column was not an isolated attack. It was in fact part of a coordinated, orchestrated smear that we now know includes at least Karl Rove.
Valerie Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA. I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985. All of my classmates were undercover–in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. Government agencies. We had official cover. That means we had a black passport–i.e., a diplomatic passport. If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity the black passport was a get out of jail free card.
A few of my classmates, and Valerie was one of these, became a non-official cover officer. That meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.
The lies by people like Victoria Toensing, Representative Peter King, and P. J. O’Rourke insist that Valerie was nothing, just a desk jockey. Yet, until Robert Novak betrayed her she was still undercover and the company that was her front was still a secret to the world. When Novak outed Valerie he also compromised her company and every individual overseas who had been in contact with that company and with her.
This kind of reality-based information is no doubt inconvenient for Republicans, but Rove’s leak undermined national security and did real damage.
Postscript: I was thinking about pulling together a giant list of Republican claims on this scandal, and debunking them one at a time, but it looks like The Left Coaster beat me to it.