Salon: Roving justice

[steve2470]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/07/19/rove_law/

By J.J. Helland



July 19, 2005 | If it turns out that White House consigliere Karl Rove -- or anyone else for that matter -- is guilty of leaking classified information that led to the outing of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame, he will be prosecuted under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a law intended to prevent the "disclosure of information by persons having or having had access to classified information that identifies a covert agent." As special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of a possible leak continues, partisans on both sides have sought to spin the court of public opinion on the matter, leading to some confusion as to how the act and some of its provisions apply in the Plame case.

To help clarify the confusion surrounding the Identities Protection Act, Salon asked professor Robert Turner, associate director of the Center for National Security at the University of Virginia law school, to explain the law in detail during the course of an interview conducted by telephone and e-mail.

What exactly is the Intelligence Identities Protection Act?

You need to understand the bill in the context of its history. Back in the '70s some very radical people got started in the business of trying to disclose the names of covert CIA and other intelligence operatives. They were led by a guy named Philip Agee, who worked for the CIA but reportedly had been cashiered while serving in Mexico City. He then went to the KGB at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City and Cuban intelligence at the Cuban Embassy and offered his services. Pretty soon the group led by Agee put out something called Covert Action Information Bulletin and Counter-Spy, two publications that routinely published the names of people they claimed were CIA, British or other Western intelligence agents. There were some people subsequently thrown out of countries. The most notable case was Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Greece, who was murdered shortly after his name appeared in one of Agee's publications. Anyway, this upset a lot of people. Congress debated and finally enacted the Intelligence Identities Protection Act .

The purpose of the act was very clear. It was to deal specifically with Agee-type problems -- to keep people from intentionally blowing the cover of covert CIA operatives. This act only applies to revealing the names of people who are actually in a "covert billet" , and it requires knowledge by the person revealing the name that the person was in a covert billet.





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[Cha]

1. I can see why ghwbush sent Wilson a

condolence note when his wife was outted..afterall he fired rove twice for whatever.