Lee Ellis: Why was CIA Leak Case two years, not two hours?

I don't understand, how an independent prosecutor can be assigned to check out whether a "leak" about an employee of the CIA is against the law, based on the only law against such a crime, and turn a simple task of two hours into a two year investigation followed by a Grand Jury probe. It seems to me that Patrick Fitzgerald could have just checked the Internet or asked Victoria Toensing, who helped write the law, if this case fitted her law. Ms. Toensing has answered a similar question by Sean Hannity on his national radio program telling Sean that this law did not apply to anyone revealing that Plame worked for the CIA or was based at Langley.

Victoria Toensing, a founding partner of diGenova & Toensing, is an internationally-known expert on white-collar crime, terrorism, national security and intelligence matters. While Chief Counsel for Senator Barry Goldwater, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 1981-1984, Toensing was instrumental in winning passage of two important bills: (1) to protect the identities of intelligence agents and (2) to protect certain classified information from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

Last July, I wrote for this publication, "Outing a CIA agent is only a crime if the agent is under cover overseas or has been during the past five years. This law was created to prevent the assassinations of CIA agents on foreign shores as had been caused by Philip Agee in 1978 who listed CIA agents undercover in foreign cities, causing the murder of some."

"�It was Novak who actually put the name, 'Valerie Plame' into the newspaper and he had called the CIA to be sure that it was OK to reveal her name. Since she was NOT a covert agent, the CIA did not stop him."

"Joseph Wilson, himself, was recorded as saying that Novak did not 'out' his wife wrongly as she was NOT a covert agent at the time. I heard this tape played on a national radio show. Actually, Plame has been in management at the CIA as a known CIA employee since the days she dated and married Wilson!"

Since writing this, we have learned that "Scooter" Libby had also talked to reporters, whom, he said, told him about Plame, but the prosecutor tells us that Libby's notes say that he was told about her by the Vice President. Based on this difference in testimony before the Grand Jury, Fitzgerald indicted Libby for a lie, not for any "outing." Is it not possible that Libby had heard this from BOTH reporters and the Vice President? He only had to tell the Grand Jury and the FBI how he learned about it, not about everyone who alerted him to this afterwards. I can't recall who first told me something two or three years ago, can you?

Jack Shafer wrote in Slate this month, "To win a conviction, the law requires, among other things: ...That the individual knew he was disclosing information that identifies a covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States. So far, we have no evidence that the United States is taking 'affirmative measures' to protect Plame's identity� "

"...Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd this week that she surrendered her secret identity to him somewhere around the time of their first kiss! If Plame's been sloppy with her identity, should somebody go to jail for leaking it? "

It seems to me that we might have here a prosecutor who turned a two hour-long job into a two year high-paying one and a chance to make himself into a well-known name via a major TV presentation, thus guaranteeing himself a long successful career in law. If this was a waste of government resources and time and if this turned into a political attack as the reason for all this time and expense, might this be the real crime?

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