Plain old classified doesn't mean too much.

At this moment there are tons of classified things which will become declassified after they get reviewed by a proper official. They sit in the limbo of low level classification mainly due to bureaucracy.

If your wife is an active agent you don't write OPED articles about foreign policy for the Times. She wasn't active. She wasn't covert and her classified employment status was probably just that. Classified. Any qualified EXEC official could repeal low level classification like that in almost an instant with a single phone call.

(b) It is presumed that information that continues to meet the classification requirements under this order requires continued protection. In some exceptional cases, however, the need to protect such information may be outweighed by the public interest in disclosure of the information, and in these cases the information should be declassified. When such questions arise, they shall be referred to the agency head or the senior agency official. That official will determine, as an exercise of discretion, whether the public interest in disclosure outweighs the damage to the national security that might reasonably be expected from disclosure.

That's a sweet paragraph there from Executive Order 12958. It means, in this instance, that with a single phonecall to Tenet (or one of the CIA's many "senior agency officials"), Plame's "classified" status went up in smoke. One can also read that paragraph so that with a chat with President Bush any classified status, also went up in smoke.

Plame was not covert. She was married and she was apparently pumping information to an enemy of the administration.

By attacking the administration publicly and questioning its credibility they made a conscious gamble that Kerry or somebody else would win in November 2004 and their disloyalty would be rewarded by the left side of the political aisle. That was a miscalculation.

They assumed that all the 2,250+ companies around the world which were in bed with Saddam would support them in trying to prevent an invasion of Iraq. I suspect Plame and Wilson were probably working for the French and/or other Euro corporate interests and were paid for producing American dissent. That information will likely be divulged and presented when Libby goes to trial.

They can pose, they can pout, but in the end Libby will walk and they will be always looking over their shoulders because they wanted to sell out their country for a book deal, loving liberal publicity and profitable relation$ with the Euro business community.

They're the ones in deep doo-doo.