My copy for truthout tonight:
<blockquote>"Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life,
I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by
exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious
of traitors."
- George Herbert Walker Bush, 1999</blockquote>
Karl Rove, senior political advisor to George W. Bush, is a very powerful
man. That is not to say he has never been in trouble. Rove was fired
from the 1992 Bush Sr. campaign for trashing Robert Mosbacher, Jr., who
was the chief fundraiser for the campaign and an avowed Bush loyalist.
Rove accomplished this trashing of Mosbacher by planting a negative story
with columnist Bob Novak. The campaign figured out that Karl had done the
dirty deed, and he was given his walking papers.
Demonstrably, Rove is back in the saddle again. The January 2003 edition
of Esquire magazine carried an article by Ron Suskind which quoted
comments from John DiIulio, a domestic policy advisor to the White House
who had just retired from his post. On October 24, DiIulio had sent a
letter to Suskind describing what he had seen while working for the Bush
administration. The meat of the letter described an administration far,
far more interested in raw political triangulation and ruthless spin than
in actual policy and government functionality. Some excerpts from
DiIulio's letter:
<blockquote>"Some are inclined to blame the high political-to-policy
ratios of this administration on Karl Rove...some staff members, senior
and junior, are awed and cowed by Karl's real or perceived powers. They
self-censor lots for fear of upsetting him, and, in turn, few of the
president's top people routinely tell the president what they really think
if they think that Karl will be brought up short in the bargain. Karl is
enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern,
post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political advisor post near the Oval
Office."</blockquote>
Even a casual political observer would have trouble missing the fact that
this is one of the sharpest political outfits ever to reside in the Oval
Office. Bush's team is a unified wall, cemented to their
message-of-the-day, and they have done very well for themselves because of
this. All of this can be laid at the feet of Karl Rove, the senior
political advisor to George W. Bush. According to DiIulio, the
preeminence of political considerations within this administration is so
complete that any and all policy considerations or contemplation of actual
issues are not so much in the back seat as they are in the trunk below the
spare tire and the jack. This, again, can be laid at the feet of Mr.
Rove.
All of Washington and the country has been buzzing for the last few days
over a report that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate
the White House regarding a matter of important national security. The
wife of a former ambassador named Joseph Wilson, it has been alleged, was
'outed' as an active CIA agent to columnist Robert Novak by this White
House in an act of political revenge.
Joseph Wilson was the man dispatched to Niger in February of 2002 by the
CIA, after Vice President Dick Cheney asked CIA to figure out whether
there was any substance to the charge that Iraq was attempting to procure
uranium "yellow cake" from that nation for the purpose of starting a
nuclear weapons program. Ambassador Wilson went, investigated, and
returned eight days later to state flatly that the evidence was garbage.
He has claimed since that his analysis was one of three intelligence
reports debunking the Niger story. Ambassador Wilson told this to
Cheney's office, the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security
Council. Despite the fact that Wilson made it clear that these
allegations were untrue - it was revealed that the 'evidence' to support
the Niger uranium charge was a pile of crudely forged documents - George
W. Bush used the Niger uranium evidence dramatically in his 2003 State of
the Union address.
In July, Ambassador Wilson went very public, criticizing the White House
for using evidence to support war that they knew was patently false. One
week later, Robert Novak reported that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was
an active CIA operative. As it turns out, two senior White House
officials cold-called six different journalists and informed them of
Valerie Plame's status as a CIA agent, according to an anonymous
administration official quoted by the Washington Post. None of the
journalists ran the story. That same administration official was quoted
about these revelations as saying, "Clearly, it was meant purely and
simply for revenge." Joseph Wilson likewise charges that this act was
done as an act of revenge for his vocal criticism of George W. Bush and
the administration's actions leading up to the Iraq war. Specifically, he
views Karl Rove as being possibly involved in, or at least condoning, the
cutting down of his wife.
The facts of this story are singularly grotesque. Taken at the top layer,
you have a White House that appears perfectly willing to go after the
family members of its critics. Valerie Plame's career is destroyed,
period. The act itself displays a level of viciousness that is dangerous
to the functioning of this, or any, democracy.
Peel the second layer and you discover the rank illegality of it all.
Section 421 of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 reads as
follows:
<blockquote>"Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified
information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any
information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized
to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed
so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking
affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence
relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or
imprisoned not more than ten years, or both."</blockquote>
The third layer is where the darkness truly lurks, and where the deadly
importance of this situation lies. Valerie Plame was not simply an
analyst or a data cruncher. She was running a network dedicated to
tracking any person or nation that might try to give weapons of mass
destruction to terrorists. That sentence deserves to be written twice.
She was running a network dedicated to tracking any person or nation that
might try to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.
The Bush administration pushed very hard the idea that America is in
danger from WMDs being placed into the hands of terrorists. This was one
of the central arguments behind the war in Iraq. Yet in order to protect
Bush's political standing, a couple of "administration officials" blew
Valerie Plame, and by proxy her network, completely out of the water in an
attempt to shut her husband up. In short, in order to protect Bush from
the ramifications of using fake evidence to support his war, this White
House destroyed an intelligence network that was protecting us from the
threat posed by chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.
We are less safe now that Valerie Plame is no longer performing this vital
task, and the members of her network are in mortal danger of being
revealed and destroyed. Beyond that, we are facing a level of hypocrisy
that shatters any and all previously known boundaries. This
administration ginned up a war in Iraq based upon manufactured evidence
and wildly overstated threats, all of which was painted over with rhetoric
about defending the country from terrorists and weapons of mass
destruction. The fate of Valerie Plame, and her network, shows without
doubt that the moral standing of this administration is as empty as Saddam
Hussein's WMD cache.
In Ambassador Wilson's words, "Naming her this way would have compromised
every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been
associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and
Aldrich Ames."
Mr. Rove has done this kind of thing before, specifically using Robert
Novak to cut down Mosbacher. Rove knows no ideology beyond power, and has
no bones about using it to wreak havoc on anyone who gets in his
crosshairs. The Esquire article about DiIulio finds him recounting a
singular Rove moment, as he overheard a conversation happening in another
room: "Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem
in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had
displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions
I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado
flinging parked cars. 'We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him.
We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!'"
Guess who was doing the cursing and threatening.
One last bit of inside baseball. When the Niger scandal erupted, the Bush
administration went out of its way to blame the CIA for the mess, despite
the fact that the CIA, along with the entire intelligence community, had
been cut out of the loop by Don Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans. The
OSP, and its pet Iraqi Ahmad Chalabi, became the source for all of the
information regarding Iraq's weapons capabilities, and a number of
intelligence insiders have publicly blamed that group for the
preponderance of highly erroneous data about Iraq. For the Bush
administration to completely usurp the CIA by depending solely on data
manufactured by the Office of Special Plans, and then to turn around and
blame CIA when the OSPs data did not turn out to be true, is as insane as
it is laughable. Yet this is what they have done. The CIA's calling for
this investigation is nothing more or less than the Agency defending
itself, proving out the oft-repeated warning that one scapegoats the CIA
at their mortal peril.
Also, the fact that this data came to the Washington post from a White
House official means that another Deep Throat may have just been born.
The White House has denied the allegation, and promises a full
investigation. A great many people find it laughable to believe this
White House is capable of investigating itself, and are demanding an
independent investigation. A quick look at the White House telephone logs
will reveal who called whom, and when. It may well be the case that Rove
was not involved; there are several administration officials - Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, Card - along with a constellation of
administration associates and media mouthpieces, who had a vested interest
in shutting Ambassador Wilson's mouth. The White House phone logs will be
revelatory. If this administration fails to hand those logs over, they
will stand in taint of high treason.
J'accuse.
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