From David Sanger at the Times:Few question that the name of a covert C.I.A. officer qualifies as an important secret:

Disclosure can get people killed. But that case is the exception, rather than the rule. In five years of covering national security issues at the Bush White House, I’ve seen classified information leaked or suddenly declared “declassified” for many reasons, most often to explain a new policy and sometimes to back up a presidential statement.

Just consider the past couple of weeks of White House reporting, which were pretty typical.

My colleague James Risen unearthed a story about a firefight between American and Syrian forces along the Iraq border. Together, we began to explore its larger meaning: An internal White House debate over whether President Bush should formally allow the war to spill over the Syrian border, so that insurgents massing there could be stopped before attacking American troops in Iraq.

The president’s top foreign policy aides met to discuss this subject on Oct. 1, though officially the White House would not acknowledge that the meeting took place.

But once they understood we were writing the article anyway, they felt compelled to talk, so that they would not appear to be stumbling into an expansion of the war. It was almost impossible to discuss the policy without wandering into events that were never made public and the debate over whether the president should issue a classified “finding” allowing action in Syria.

Our more creative sources found a way to talk carefully, using coded phrases like “if such a meeting happened …” or “if the President decided to. …”

Much the same happens when I press officials to explain the administration’s options for beginning a withdrawal in Iraq next year. This means cutting past the president’s oft-repeated statement that “as the Iraqis stand up, we can stand down.” Similarly, you cannot intelligently discuss the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran, or China’s missile buildup, without trafficking in facts marked classified.

So it is not uncommon for such facts to slip out, sometimes from officials seeking to wake up the administration or Congress to what they consider an under-appreciated threat. Plenty of strategic leaking goes on in the administration - especially if officials think they can conceal the sources of the information and make it public without putting someone’s life in danger.