- If there is one trait that has followed the Bush family
through generations of privilege, it is the ability to escape scandal
a skill that will be put to the test again over the leaking of the identity
of an undercover CIA officer, apparently to get back at her husband for
criticizing George W. Bush's case for invading Iraq.
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- The criminal investigation into who revealed Valerie
Plame's identity and endangered clandestine operatives working with her
has been building for two years. But it is finally reaching critical mass
with the disclosure that Bush's political guru Karl Rove discussed Plame's
CIA work with Time correspondent Matthew Cooper in July 2003.
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- Rove appears to have been part of a P.R. campaign to
punish Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for writing an
article on July 6, 2003, that the administration had reason to doubt claims
about Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium when Bush cited that dramatic allegation
in his State of the Union address in January 2003.
-
- A United Nations agency debunked the yellowcake claim
in March 2003 finding that it was based on forged documents but Rove
and other Bush allies still went on the offensive against Wilson in July
2003. Their primary line of attack was to assert that his CIA wife had
authorized his trip to Niger in 2002 to check out the allegations.
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- It was never clear why this trip-authorization argument
was relevant. Presumably it was meant to discredit Wilson by suggesting
that the guy was untrustworthy or needed his wife's help to get a job.
(Incidentally, Wilson and Plame denied that Plame authorized the trip,
which was ordered by her CIA superiors.)
-
- Yet, even today, Republicans and the powerful conservative
news media are continuing this denigration of Joe Wilson. Since the disclosures
about Rove tipping Time magazine about Mrs. Wilson's CIA work, Bush's defenders
have resumed the debate about who authorized Wilson's Niger trip.
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- False Memo
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- On July 12, the Republican National Committee distributed
"talking points" asserting that Rove's comments to Cooper were
simply to save the reporter from publishing a "false story based on
a false premise" which the RNC defined as "Joe Wilson's allegation
that the vice president sent him to Niger."
-
- But this assertion in the RNC's talking-point memo is
false, even according to the Republicans' own citation.
-
- Here is how the Republicans lay out their case in the
memo: "Wilson falsely claimed that it was Vice President Cheney who
sent him to Niger, but the vice president has said he never met him and
didn't know who sent him."
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- However, the talking-point memo then details what Wilson
actually said:
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- "Wilson says he traveled to Niger at CIA request
to help provide response to vice president's office. 'In February 2002,
I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice
President Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence
report... The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check
out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president,s
office.'"
-
- So, Wilson is not claiming that Dick Cheney "sent
him" to Niger. Indeed, there is no contradiction between Wilson's
explanation about the CIA asking him to check out a report that had interested
Cheney and Cheney's statement that he didn't know Wilson.
-
- The RNC's accusation that Wilson lied is another example
of the continuing GOP campaign against Wilson. It's a case of the RNC lying,
not Wilson lying.
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- Neocon Strategy
-
- The "talking point" memo also is a classic
example of how the neoconservatives have used rhetorical games since the
early 1980s when they rose to power under Ronald Reagan and George H.W.
Bush.
-
- When people have come up with information that can cause
the neocons trouble, the neocons have applied an approach called "controversializing"
the accuser.
-
- The process works whether that person is a federal prosecutor
(as in the case of Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh), a member
of Congress (as with Rep. Henry Gonzalez and his probe of George H.W. Bush's
secret aid to Iraq); a journalist (as with New York Times correspondent
Raymond Bonner, who wrote about Central American death squads in the early
1980s); or a private citizen (like Wilson was when he questioned Bush's
use of the yellowcake allegations).
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- In 1991-92, for instance, Walsh a lifelong Republican
closed in on the obstruction of justice that had surrounded the Iran-Contra
scandal for five years. Walsh's investigation broke through the White House
cover-up when his staff discovered hidden notes belonging to former Defense
Secretary Caspar Weinberger.
-
- The notes made clear that there was widespread knowledge
of the 1985 illegal arms shipments to Iran and that George Bush Sr. had
been lying when he claimed that he was "not in the loop" on the
covert Iranian shipments.
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- Walsh Bashing
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- The belated discovery led to indictments against senior
CIA officials and Weinberger. In retaliation, the conservative Washington
Times and the Wall Street Journal's editorial page fired near-daily barrages
at Walsh often over trivial matters, such as his first-class air fare or
room-service meals.
-
- Congressional Republicans also denounced Walsh and called
for an end to his investigation. Key mainstream columnists and editorial
writers for the Washington Post and the New York Times along with many
TV pundits joined in the Walsh bashings. Walsh was mocked as a modern-day
Captain Ahab, the character from Moby Dick.
-
- In his memoir, Firewall, Walsh compared his trying experience
to another maritime classic, Ernest Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. In
that story, an aging fisherman hooks a giant marlin and, after a long battle,
secures the fish to side of his boat. On the way back to port, the marlin
is attacked by sharks that devour its flesh and deny the fisherman his
prize.
-
- "As the independent counsel, I sometimes felt like
the old man," Walsh wrote, "more often, I felt like the marlin."
-
- The congressional and media attacks limited Walsh's ability
to pursue other false statements by senior Reagan-Bush officials. Those
perjury inquiries could have unraveled a variety of national-security mysteries
of the 1980s and helped correct the history of the era. But Walsh could
not overcome the pack-like hostility of official Washington.
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- Rep. Gonzalez, D-Texas, encountered similar ridicule
in 1991-92 when he revealed that George H.W. Bush and other senior Republicans
had followed an ill-fated covert policy of coddling Saddam Hussein in the
1980s.
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- Nazi Investments
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- The Bush family's success in brushing aside scandals
dates back even further to when Prescott Bush, George W. Bush's grandfather,
escaped disgrace despite his role in helping to finance the Nazi war machine
in the years before World War II.
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- By the mid-1930s, Prescott Bush was a managing partner
of Brown Brothers Harriman, which handled a variety of sensitive investments
in Germany. When Germany and Japan went to war against the United States
in 1941, these holdings became political liabilities.
-
- The U.S. government seized the property of the Hamburg-Amerika
line under the Trading with the Enemy Act in August 1942. The government
also moved against affiliates of the Union Banking Corporation where Nazi
financial backer Fritz Thyssen had placed money. UBC was run by Brown Brothers
Harriman, and Prescott Bush was a UBC director.
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- For many public figures, allegations of trading with
the enemy would have been a political kiss of death, but the disclosures
barely left a lipstick smudge on Prescott Bush, Averell Harriman and others
implicated in the Nazi business dealings.
-
- "Politically, the significance of these dealings
the great surprise is that none of it seemed to matter much over the
next decade or so," wrote Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty. "A
few questions would be raised, but Democrat Averell Harriman would not
be stopped from becoming federal mutual security administrator in 1951
or winning election as governor of New York in 1954...
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- "Nor would Republican Prescott Bush (who was elected
senator from Connecticut in 1952) and his presidential descendants be hurt
in any of their future elections. It is almost as if these various German
embroilments, despite their potential for scandal, were regarded as unfortunate
but in essence business as usual."
-
- But the quick dissipation of the Nazi financial scandal
was only a portent of the Bush family's future. Unlike politicians of lower
classes, the Bushes seemed to operate in a bubble impervious to accusations
of impropriety. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege:
Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]
-
- That protective bubble has grown thicker over the decades
with the emergence of a strong conservative news media that can be counted
on to defend George W. Bush's interests regardless of the merits of his
position.
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- Parallel Universe
-
- Yet, in the continuing assault on former Ambassador Wilson,
Bush's political allies seem to be testing the limits of how far they can
lure Americans into a parallel universe where Bush and his White House
team are always beyond reproach.
-
- Rather than finally accept that some senior officials
in the White House may have acted improperly two years ago in divulging
the identity of Wilson's wife as a covert CIA officer, the Republican attack
machine has stayed on the offensive.
-
- "The angry Left is trying to smear" Rove, declared
Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman, even as White House officials
refused to answer questions by citing an "ongoing investigation."
[Washington Post, July 13, 2005]
-
- So Rove famous for his smear campaigns against George
W. Bush's opponents from Texas Gov. Ann Richards to Arizona Sen. John McCain
is being reinvented as a blameless victim.
-
- Recent history also is being turned on its head. What
should be clear by this point is that the Bush administration was determined
in 2002 to construct a case for invading Iraq regardless of the evidence
and was using weapons of mass destruction as the hot button that was sure
to terrify the American people.
-
- According to the infamous Downing Street Memo on July
23, 2002, Richard Dearlove, chief of the British intelligence agency MI6,
described his discussions with Bush,s National Security Council officials.
-
- "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military
action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence
and facts were being fixed around the policy," Dearlove said.
-
- The memo added, "It seemed clear that Bush had made
up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided.
But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his
WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."
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- 'White Paper'
-
- Though the British knew how flimsy the case was, Prime
Minister Tony Blair agreed to throw in his lot with Bush for the sake of
the Anglo-American alliance.
-
- On Sept. 24, 2002, Blair's government published a "white
paper" on Iraq's WMD stating, "there is intelligence that Iraq
has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
While this statement was technically true, the reality was that the so-called
"intelligence" resulted from an apparent forgery.
-
- In his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003, Bush
then cited the British "white paper" in what became known as
the "sixteen words." In making his case for war with Iraq, Bush
said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
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- Little more than a month later, on March 7, 2003, the
International Atomic Energy Agency exposed the Niger documents as "not
authentic." The next day, a State Department spokesman acknowledged
that the U.S. government "fell for it."
-
- Wilson a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Niger then
appeared on CNN, saying that the U.S. government had more information about
the Niger fabrication. After that appearance, Wilson wrote in his memoir,
The Politics of Truth, that sources told him that a meeting in the vice
president's office led to a decision "to produce a workup" to
discredit Wilson.
-
- Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003.
Though U.S. forces ousted Saddam Hussein's government three weeks later,
no caches of WMD were discovered, nor was there any evidence of an active
nuclear-weapons program.
-
- On July 6, 2003, Wilson wrote an op-ed article for the
New York Times entitled "What I Didn't Find in Africa" and appeared
on NBC's "Meet the Press" to elaborate on his conclusion that
Iraq had not tried to buy uranium from Niger. Two days later, Wilson wrote
in his memoir, right-wing columnist Robert Novak told one of Wilson's friends
that he (Novak) knew about Plame's work for the CIA.
-
- On July 11, 2003, Time magazine correspondent Cooper
wrote an internal e-mail saying that he "spoke to Rove on double super
secret background and had gotten a "big warning" not to "get
too far out on Wilson." Rove was pushing the theme that Wilson's trip
had not been authorized by Cheney or CIA Director George Tenet, but rather
"wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues."
-
- The timing of Cooper's e-mail was significant because
it preceded Novak's public disclosure of Plame's name three days later
on July 14. That meant Rove, a political operative, had been given a discrete
intelligence secret the identity of a covert CIA officer prior to its
appearance in the public domain.
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- Novak Column
-
- In the July 14 column, Novak also stressed the supposed
relevance of Wilson's wife allegedly intervening to get Wilson the assignment.
"Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested
sending him to Niger to investigate" the yellowcake report.
-
- After Novak's column, the Bush administration appears
to have intensified its campaign to discredit Wilson. On July 20, 2003,
NBC's correspondent Andrea Mitchell told Wilson that "senior White
House sources" had called her to stress "the real story here
is not the 16 words but Wilson and his wife," according to Wilson's
memoir.
-
- The next day, Wilson said he was told by MSNBC's Chris
Matthews that "I just got off the phone with Karl Rove. He says and
I quote, 'Wilson's wife is fair game.' I will confirm that if asked."
-
- In that time frame, Novak told Newsday that he was approached
by the his sources with the information about Plame. "I didn't dig
it out, it was given to me," Novak said. "They thought it was
significant, they gave me the name and I used it." [Newsday, July
22, 2003]
-
- On July 30, 2003, the CIA requested a Justice Department
investigation into the disclosure of a covert CIA officer, leading to the
appointment of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as a special prosecutor
five months later.
-
- So far the Bush administration has been able to contain
the damage from the scandal. Rove personally oversaw Bush's re-election
campaign in 2004, when the Plame case was barely mentioned. After Bush's
victory, Bush promoted Rove to deputy White House chief of staff.
-
- Since the scandal has resurfaced in the past few weeks
as New York Times reporter Judith Miller went to jail rather than divulge
her sources and Time magazine agreed to cooperate with Fitzgerald the
White House has refused to comment while letting the RNC and the conservative
news media carry the fight.
-
- On July 13, 2005, the Wall Street Journal editorial depicted
Rove as not just a victim, but a hero. "Mr. Rove is turning out to
be the real 'whistleblower' in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal," the
editorial said. "Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans
could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but a partisan
trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign."
-
- The pundits on Fox News and on right-wing talk radio
have pounded out similar messages to their audiences.
-
- Still, whether George W. Bush can match his father and
grandfather in turning aside scandal is yet to be decided.
-
- - Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy
& Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be
ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com.
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- http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/071405.html
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