The man who sparked Watergate, Daniel Ellsberg, has deja vu watching the Bush administration try to spin the Plame leak.
Watching the Valerie Plame scandal unfold, Daniel Ellsberg has déjà vu. In 1971, Ellsberg became the most famous leaker in American history with his release of the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers, a Defense Department study of the country's sordid involvement in Indochina. Besides revealing the lies and hypocrisy of American policy in a war its leaders knew was futile, Ellsberg's leak led Nixon to create the plumbers, the dirty tricks squad that broke into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office looking for information to discredit him. Nixon's henchmen would use similar tactics against Democratic opponents, leading to the Watergate scandal and the president's downfall.
Today, Ellsberg says, America is in the early stages of a similar crisis. Once again, he says, the country is embroiled in a foreign war for murky reasons. Once again, he says, the White House has justified its policy with lies, and is smearing a whistle-blower who exposed those lies.
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Conservative defenders of the White House are saying that that narrative doesn't make sense -- they don't see how the administration would take such a huge risk for so little gain. Andrew Sullivan writes, "Like many others, I'm still baffled by the rationale."Andrew Sullivan, like most people, is easily baffled when he needs to be. In this case it isn't that baffling when you know the context. Several of the
who have not revealed their sources have told Wilson of conversations they had . The word being used was "nepotism," that Wilson was sent to Niger on a kind of junket. There is a discrediting aspect that they're now pushing strongly. The implication of Novak's column is that the CIA was sending a biased person.
There may be an element here of Rove having a bad temper and getting specifically vindictive, but that's not an unusual trait at that level. People who get that job are tough guys, and there's a reason for it -- they really do need to keep these kinds of secrets, secrets of their lies and their crimes, because they pursue policies that have to be kept secret from the public.
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http://salon.com/news/feature/2003/10/03/ellsberg/index.html
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