What Watergate could teach the White House

[rodeodance]

i do hope this issue--come October--gets labeled as a 'coverup".


http://news.ft.com/cms/s/73182b30-0f4c-11da-8b31-00000e2511c8.html

> What Watergate could teach the White House
> By Marvin Kalb
> Published: August 17 2005 19:59 | Last updated: August 17 2005 19:59
>
> Somebody is lying. So wrote Terry Neal, a Washington Post reporter, on July 25 2005. He was writing about one of the strangest stories to engulf the White House since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. It is the story of an official investigation into who leaked the name of a CIA operative to the media. According to a 1982 law, that kind of leak would be illegal. Two prominent names have emerged in the investigation of the leak – Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, and Lewis Libby, vice-president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff........


>
> According to recent opinion polls, including an August 7 poll in Newsweek magazine, the American people are increasingly of the view that Mr Rove, whom Mr Bush described as the “architect” of his 2004 re-election, may be guilty of unethical or illegal behaviour in connection with the leak...........


A key lesson from the Watergate scandal is that sometimes a cover-up can be worse than the crime. In this case, a usually media-savvy White House, stung by criticism of its justification for war, lashed out at one critic and then took the inexplicable step of orchestrating the outing of his CIA wife, unintentionally triggering a chain of events.

It would have been so much better if the White House had simply acknowledged its blunder – and apologised. The American people would almost surely have “understood”.