- "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
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- 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.
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- 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:
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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 a 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.
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- 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.
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- 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:
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- "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."
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- 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 an operative 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 an operative running a network dedicated to
tracking any person or nation that might try to give weapons of mass destruction
to terrorists.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- The current spin from administration defenders within
and without the mainstream media is that Valerie Plame was only an analyst,
and not an operative. This, somehow, is supposed to lessen the blow of
an administration willing to attack the families of its critics. Yet the
characterization of Plame as an analyst is factually incorrect. For one,
Robert Novak himself indicated that she was an operative in the original
report that birthed this scandal. "Wilson never worked for the CIA,"
wrote Novak, "but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative
on weapons of mass destruction."
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- Ray McGovern, who was for 27-years a senior analyst
for the CIA, further confirms the status of Plame within the CIA. "I
know Joseph Wilson well enough to know," said McGovern in a telephone
conversation we had today, "that his wife was in fact a deep cover
operative running a network of informants on what is supposedly this administration's
first-priority issue: Weapons of mass destruction."
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- McGovern further elaborated on the damage done when
such an agent has their cover blown. "This causes a great deal of
damage," said McGovern. "These kinds of networks take ten years
to develop. The reason why they operate under deep cover is that the only
people who have access to the kind of data we need cannot be associated
in any way with the American intelligence community. Our operatives live
a lie to maintain these networks, and do so out of patriotism. When they
get blown, the operatives themselves are in physical danger. The people
they recruit are also in physical danger, because foreign intelligence
services can make the connections and find them. Operatives like Valerie
Plame are real patriots."
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- Mr. Rove has done this kind of thing before, specifically
using Robert Novak in that one notable attempt to cut down Mosbacher. Rove
is a disciple of the undisputed heavyweight champion of political assassins,
Lee Atwater, and has often reached into a deep bag of dirty tricks to accomplish
his political ends. He 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!'"
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- Guess who was doing the cursing and threatening.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- J'accuse.
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