Plamnesia--II

By James Taranto
Wall Street Journal
March 20, 2007

Yesterday we noted that Kerfuffle Gal Valerie Plame testified she did not know whether she was a "covert" CIA agent as defined under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 2003, when her supposedly secret identity surfaced. Reader Jim Lucas makes a crucial point that we missed:

The Intelligence Identities Protection Act makes it a federal crime to intentionally reveal the identity of an agent whom one knows to be covert. So how can anyone be accused of knowingly revealing Valerie Plame's identity as a covert agent if Valerie Plame herself didn't know if she was covert according to the law?

That pretty much settles the question, doesn't it? If Plame's status was secret even from herself, how could "leaker" Richard Armitage or "perjurer" Scooter Libby possibly have known?