An Open Letter to the P-G

Dear Pittsburgh Post-Gazette;

Now that you have a new "co-publisher" I was wondering if you were planning on getting your former "National Security" Correnspondent Jack Kelly to issue a correction for some errors in his columns.

For example on June 17, 2006 he wrote:

Mr. Fitzgerald was appointed to determine whether the Intelligence Identities Protection Act had been violated. The answer was no, because the law applies only to those who are working under cover overseas, or who have done so in the five years preceding disclosure, and Ms. Plame had been manning a desk at CIA headquarters for longer than that.

And on July 17, 2005 he wrote:

The law defines a "covert agent" as someone working undercover overseas, or who has done so in the last five years. Plame had operated under non-official cover, but was outed by CIA traitor Aldrich Ames, and has been manning a desk at CIA headquarters since 1997.

Never mind that Fitzgerald's investigation was not limited to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. In a letter to Congressman John Conyers dated January 30, 2004 X wrote:

By letter dated 30 July 2003, the CIA reported to the Criminal Division of the DoJ a possibile violation of criminal law concerning the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

It's Kelly's description of Valerie Plame's employment, published in your paper, that's at issue here.

It's wrong.

According to this recently released unclassified document, filed in a U.S. District Court:

On 1 January, 2002 Valerie Wilson was working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as an operations officer in the Directorate of Operations (DO). She was assigned to the Counterproliferation Division (CPD) at CIA Headquarters, where she served as chief of a CPD component with responsibility for weapons proliferation issues related to Iraq.

While assigned to CPD, Ms. Wilson engaged in temporary duty (TDY) travel overseas on official business. She traveled at least seven times to more than ten countries. When travelling overseas, Ms. Wilson always travelled under a cover identity--sometimes in true name and sometimes in alias--but always using cover--whether official or non-official cover (NOC)--with no ostensible relationship to the CIA.

At the time of the initial unauthorized disclosure in the media of Ms. Wilson's employment relationship with the CIA on 14 July 2003, Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for whom the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.

So she had traveled overseas and the CIA had considered her covert - and all of this was considered classified by the CIA. The violation of the law was the unauthorized release of classified information. So Mr Kelly mischaracterized both the investigation and the facts pertaining to that investigation.

As he was writing as your "National Security Correspondent" at the time, had he not done his homework and checked this out? Or did he at the time have no contacts in the "National Security" community who could have told him what the facts were? Did he know all this to be true but decided to spread misinformation anyway?

And finally,

Can we expect a correction from him anytime soon?