In order for Plame's identification in Novak's column to be considered violating the law, all the following elements of proof must be met:

1. The person who told Novak (or anyone else) had to have had access to classified information that identified Plame as covert. Even if the information is accurate, if the "leaker" did not learn it from classified sources, there is no violation of the law.

2. The disclosure of Plame's covert status must have been intentional; this would seem easy to ascertain.

3. The person receiving the information, i.e., Novak, was not authorized to receive classified information; again, this would seem easy to prove.

4. The discloser must have known that the information identified Plame as covert.

5. The discloser must have known that the United States was taking positive actions to conceal Plame's covert intelligence relationship to the US government.

Note well: all five of these things had to have happened in order for the law to have been violated. IMO, that will be very difficult to prove; in fact, the CIA itself seems to have shown that #5 was not being done. Novak writes,

At the CIA, the official designated to talk to me ... asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause "difficulties" if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered.

If the CIA was taking affirmative actions to conceal Plame's intelligence status, that's a pretty weak way of heading off a reporter's question, but no doubt that the official whom Novak interviewed will be extensively questioned by investigators.

Who is Donald Sensing?

I should advise my readers here that as the chief of media relations for XVIII Airborne Corps and five years as a public affairs officer at the Pentagon and as chief of public affairs for US Army CID Command, I have an awful lot of experience in speaking to reporters about topics that had classified content. I don't know what the CIA's public-affairs policy is, but I can't imagine it would be less restrictive than the US Army's. Our policy was quite simple: classified information was not discussed, period.

I guess he knows a little something about dealing with the press.