THE US: On July 7th, 2003, a memo was delivered to US secretary of state Colin Powell as he was leaving for a trip to Africa with US president George Bush on Air Force One.
It contained a report from State Department intelligence experts concerning the controversy over claims that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium from Niger. There was a reference to Valerie Plame, a CIA operative and wife of Joe Wilson, a former ambassador who had gone to Niger to check out the reports and who found they were without substance.
The paragraph referring to Ms Plame was clearly marked (S) for secret, indicating that anyone who read it - and several White House officials on the flight had access to it - would have known the information was classified.
The memo's contents, revealed yesterday in the Washington Post, add fuel to the controversy over the leaking by President Bush's political adviser Karl Rove of information about Ms Plame.
Names of covert CIA officers are classified as secret and any intentional disclosure of the name is a potential crime under an 1982 law if the person knows that it is secret. Prosecutors investigating the leak are trying to establish if White House officials knowingly revealed Ms Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative to reporters after seeing the memo, the Post reported. Plame was "outed" by columnist Robert Novak seven days after the memo was circulated.
Mr Wilson had publicly criticised Mr Bush's claim before the Iraq invasion that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear weapons in Africa. He has since accused the White House of a smear campaign to discredit his findings by suggesting he only got the trip to Niger because of his wife's influence.
A few days before Ms Plame's identity was revealed, Mr Rove told Time reporter Matthew Cooper that Mr Wilson's wife was in the CIA. Mr Rove told prosecutors the first time he saw the memo was when "people in the special prosecutor's office" showed it to him, according to his lawyer. Cooper testified on Capitol Hill on Wednesday that without whistle-blowers who felt they could come forward with a degree of confidence, "we might never have known the extent of the Watergate scandal or Enron's deceptions or events that needed to be exposed".
He was speaking to the Senate judiciary committee on proposed legislation that would protect journalists from having to reveal confidential sources. Bush administration officials urged the committee not to approve the legislation as it would create "serious impediments" to law enforcement and the war on terrorism.
Deputy attorney general James Comey said in a written submission that the legislation would benefit criminal or terrorist groups that also have "media operations," such as al-Qaeda.
New York Times reporter Judith Miller is in her second week in prison in Washington for refusing to reveal her source for information about Ms Plame to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.