Three recent posts on the Plame issue, Bush, and his thugs. Make sure you go to Orincus' site, for the last post, and follow all the links within the entry. Also lots of other good stuff there.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2003/10/18/dont_ask_dont_know/Don't ask, don't know
10/18/2003
AT A TIME when President Bush ought to be doing everything he can to show that he is an engaged commander in chief, he is acting as though there is nothing he can or should do to discover and punish the officials who leaked to columnist Robert Novak the identity of the CIA's Valerie Plame Wilson. Bush's passivity in response to a political dirty trick that harms US intelligence operations and demoralizes intelligence officers is an abdication of responsibility.
Bush has left the work of locating the leakers to the Justice Department and the FBI, while he plays the role of a detached observer. This stance makes him look like a weak leader presiding over a band of unruly subordinates who feud with each other, betraying patriotic Americans like Ms. Wilson, with no fear of being brought to hand by the president.
If he wished to do so, Bush could summon the likely suspects from the vice president's office, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council to the Oval Office and tell them that, as their president, he is ordering the officials who gave away Valerie Plame's cover to confess their role and resign.
What the leakers did was not a merely technical violation of the law. By revealing her identity, the dirty tricksters in the administration sacrificed all the informants and sources who had ever, wittingly or unwittingly, given Wilson intelligence information. Perhaps even more destructive was the leakers' apparent attempt to show the CIA there is a price to pay for refusing to tailor the agency's analyses to the wishes of policy makers.
http://www.popmatters.com/columns/sirota/031015.shtml In the last two years, those who were honest about Iraq have been fired, disparaged and defamed by the Bush Administration's attack machine. While Bush's spokesman Scott McClellan claims in a 7 October Whitehouse press briefing, "It is absurd to suggest that this White House would seek to punish someone for speaking out with a different view", the facts show that truth-tellers face "slime and defend" treatment, as one Republican aide told the New York Times. When White House economist Lawrence Lindsey said the war would cost at least $100-200 billion (which has proven to be accurate), he was fired because the White House was trying to blur the cost estimates. When Mideast envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni said that the Administration had more important national security concerns than Iraq, he too was fired. When Gen. Eric Shinseki (accurately) refuted the Administration by admitting an Iraq occupation would require "several hundred thousand troops." Shinseki was publicly disparaged by the Pentagon. When US soldiers told ABC News they were misled about the length of their tours in Iraq, they were threatened with court martials, and the Administration told other reporters the ABC correspondent was a gay Canadian (as if that mattered).
While these purges/smears were going on, the White House was promoting the most dishonest in its ranks. Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly ignored intelligence by telling the American people that Iraq had nuclear weapons. For his efforts, he was rewarded with huge influence over Iraq policymaking — so much so that US News and World Report now calls him the "the most powerful vice president in history" (13 October 2003). Similarly, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the decision to go to war was based on "new evidence" of an Iraqi threat that came to light after 2001. She said this knowing that most pre-war intelligence came from before 1998 Washington Post 27 September 2003), knowing that Colin Powell admitted in 2001 that Saddam was not a threat and knowing that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that the war decision was not made "because we had discovered dramatic new evidence." For her dishonesty, she was recently named head of a new panel that will oversee rebuilding in Iraq.
So now we have a government that places value on lies and treats honesty like a crime. It doesn't matter that outing a CIA agent endangers agents in the field and weakens American security. It doesn't matter that intelligence was distorted to mislead the American people into a war. What matters above everything is loyalty to the White House. Anything else — national security, integrity — is secondary.
There is a term for this kind of thing in the dictionary, and it is not "democracy". An administration that "forcibly suppresses opposition" and shows a "tendency toward strong autocratic control" like the one in power is called facism. And, as former White House counsel and Watergate figure John Dean notes, we are only glimpsing the abyss. "I thought I had seen political dirty tricks as foul as they could get, but I was wrong," he recently wrote. "Bush's people have out-Nixoned Nixon's people. And my former colleagues were not amateurs by any means." (Salon.com 3 October 2003). The only thing surprising about Dean's comments is that they were not made far earlier by more people when America had the chance to change course.
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003_10_12_dneiwert_archive.html#106650181266608156 The Plame affair matters.
The New York Times explained: Ms. Plame, a specialist in nonconventional weapons who worked overseas, had "nonofficial cover," and was what in C.I.A. parlance is called a Noc, the most difficult kind of false identity for the agency to create. While most undercover agency officers disguise their real profession by pretending to be American embassy diplomats or other United States government employees, Ms. Plame passed herself off as a private energy expert. Intelligence experts said that Nocs have especially dangerous jobs."Nocs are the holiest of holies," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former agency officer who is now director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
It matters because the deliberate exposure of an undercover agent's identity in a way that grotesquely compromises national security and the potential deaths of agents abroad constitutes outright treason.
And no, we're not talking about Ann Coulter's nearly hallucinogenic version of treason, but the Aldrich Ames kind of treason. The real thing that earns people prison terms.
It matters because the culpability for the leak goes right to the heart of the Oval Office. The sources of the leak appear to be within the inner circle of the Bush White House, including chief of staff Karl Rove, who has been identified by Jospeh Wilson, Plame's husband, and reporters as one of the administration officials who contacted them after the Novak column's appearance and exacerbated the effects of Plame's original exposure by explicitly encouraging its further spread.
The fact that these matters reach the highest levels of government is underscored by the reports that the White House, according to the Boston Globe, is reserving the option of resorting to "executive privilege" claims to shield some of its documents from the Justice Department investigation:
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