WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US administration has urged the Supreme Court to throw out a case brought by ex-CIA spy Valerie Plame who is suing former officials after her cover was blown to the media in 2003.
Solicitor general Elena Kagan said in a written admission to the nation's top court that a federal court's rejection of the claim by Plame and her husband Joe Wilson should stand.
"Further review is unwarranted," Kagan wrote in the documents seen Friday by AFP, adding "the petition should be denied."
Plame and her husband have alleged that former vice president Dick Cheney and aides deliberately outed Plame as a CIA agent.
They say the move was aimed at punishing the couple after Wilson, a former US ambassador, publicly refuted the previous administration's claims in the build up to the Iraq war that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had tried to buy material for nuclear weapons from Africa.
Revealing the identity of a secret agent to the media is a federal crime in the United States, and the affair stoked a huge scandal.
Former Cheney aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby is the only person to have been charged in the affair and he was sentenced in June 2007 to more than two years in jail for obstruction of justice in the subsequent investigation.
He was pardoned the following month by then president George W. Bush and avoided jail.
Plame's case has twice been knocked back in the federal courts, and the couple have appealed to the top tribunal to award them fair damages for the violation of their constitutional rights and their private lives.
Their lawsuit targeted Cheney, Libby, former top Bush aide Karl Rove, and former assistant secretary of state Richard Armitage.
Kagan argued in her submission to the court, that the case should be denied because under US privacy laws federal agencies can be pursued for damages claims but not individuals.
"In any event, the court (of appeals) was correct to recognize that the litigation of the allegations in the amended complaint would inevitably require judicial intrusion into matters of national security and sensitive intelligence information," she added.
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