On monday I wrote this:
"With all the attention being paid to if Rove leaked Plame's name, we are missing the point.
As a covert agent, wasn't the fact that she worked for the CIA classified?
Cooper's email shows that he leaked that fact:
"told me that the White House had not paid attention to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's CIA-sponsored February 2002 trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction."
We know from the DOD documents (posted on AMERICAblog) that if you leak classified info, your clearance should be pulled.
As Deputy Chief of Staff, Rove coordinates the National Security Council. He could not do this with out a security clearance, so this is what we should focus on. Let Fitzgerald worry about seeing if he leaked Plame's name. "
Today The Nations David Corn backs this idea up:
"By disclosing Valerie Wilson's relationship to the CIA, Rove was passing classified information to a reporter.
"There is little doubt," says Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, that the employment status of an undercover CIA officer, "is classified information." He notes that the "most basic personnel information of the CIA--the number of personnel, the salaries--is classified. Anything more specific--like the identity of a NOC [an officer working under "nonofficial cover," as was Valerie Wilson] or the numbers and identities of officers working in a particular region of the world--is classified."
To sum up, it does not matter if Rove did not mention Valerie Wilson by name, and it is not true that the information he passed to Cooper was not classified.
"
The rest of the article here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20050713/cm_thenation/35857/nc:742