- If special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald delivers indictments
of a few functionaries of the vice president's office or the White House,
we are likely to have on our hands a constitutional crisis. The evidence
of widespread wrongdoing and conspiracy is before every American with a
cheap laptop and a cable television subscription. And we do not have the
same powers of subpoena granted to Fitzgerald.
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- We know, however, based upon what we have read and seen
and heard that someone created fake documents related to Niger and Iraq
and used them as a false pretense to launch America into an invasion of
Iraq. And when a former diplomat made an honest effort to find out the
facts, a plan was hatched to both discredit and punish him by revealing
the identity of his undercover CIA agent wife.
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- Patrick Fitzgerald has before him the most important
criminal case in American history. Watergate, by comparison, was a random
burglary in an age of innocence. The investigator's prosecutorial authority
in this present case is not constrained by any regulation. If he finds
a thread connecting the leak to something greater, Fitzgerald has the legal
power to follow it to the web in search of the spider. It seems unlikely,
then, that he would simply go after the leakers and the people who sought
to cover up the leak when it was merely a secondary consequence of the
much greater crime of forging evidence to foment war. Fitzgerald did not
earn his reputation as an Irish alligator by going after the little guy.
Presumably, he is trying to find evidence that Karl Rove launched a covert
operation to create the forged documents and then conspired to out Valerie
Plame when he learned the fraud was being uncovered by Plame's husband,
Ambassador Joseph Wilson. As much as this sounds like the plot of a John
le Carre novel, it also comports with the profile of the Karl Rove I have
known, watched, traveled with and written about for the past 25 years.
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- We may stand witness to a definitive American moment
of democracy. The son of a New York doorman probably has in his hands,
in many ways, the fate of the republic. Because far too many of us know
and are aware of the crimes committed by our government in our name, we
are unlikely to settle for a handful of minor indictments of bureaucrats.
The last thing most of us believe in is the rule of law. We do not trust
our government or the people we have elected but our constitution is still
very much alive and we choose to believe that destiny has placed Patrick
Fitzgerald at this time and this place in our history to save us from the
people we elected. If the law cannot get to the truth of what has happened
to the American people under the Bush administration, then we all may begin
to hear the early death rattles of history's greatest democracy.
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- Fortunately, there are good signs. Fitzgerald has reportedly
asked for a copy of the Italian government's investigation into the break-in
of the Niger embassy in Rome and the source of the forged documents. The
blatantly fake papers, which purported to show that Saddam Hussein had
cut a deal to get yellowcake uranium from Niger, turned up after a December
2001 meeting in Rome involving neo-con Michael Ledeen, Larry Franklin,
Harold Rhodes, and Niccolo Pollari, the head of Italy's intelligence agency
SISMI, and Antonio Martino, the Italian defense minister.
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- If Fitzgerald is examining the possibility that Ledeen
was executing a plan to help his friend Karl Rove build a case for invading
Iraq? Ledeen has long ties to Italian intelligence agency operatives and
has spanned the globe to bring the world the constant variety of what he
calls "creative destruction" to build democracies. He makes the
other neo-cons appear passive. He brought the Reagan administration together
with the Iranian arms dealer who dragged the country through Iran-Contra
and shares with his close friend Karl Rove a personal obsession with Machiavelli.
Ledeen, who is almost rabidly anti-Arab, famously told the Washington Post
that Karl Rove told him, "Any time you have a good idea, tell me."
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- The federal grand jury has to at least consider whether
Ledeen called Rove with an idea to use his contacts with the Italian CIA
to hatch a plan to create the rationale for war. Ledeen told radio interviewer
Ian Masters and his producer Louis Vandenberg, "I have absolutely
no connection to the Niger documents, have never even seen them. I did
not work on them, never handled them, know virtually nothing about them,
don't think I ever wrote or said anything about the subject." It is
strictly coincidence then that some months after he and his neo-con consorts
and Italian intelligence officers met in Rome that the Niger embassy was
illegally entered and nothing was stolen other than letterhead and seals.
And equally coincident that forged papers under those letterheads were
slipped to Elisabetta Burba, a writer for an Italian glossy owned by Silvio
Berlusconi, Italy's prime minister, and a backer of the Bush invasion scheme.
Unfortunately for the pro-war neo-cons, even an Italian tabloid would not
publish the fake documents and turned them over to the CIA and US government
in Rome.
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- The other American attendees at Ledeen's Roman Holiday
are also worthy of scrutiny. Larry Franklin was recently arrested for leaking
classified US government information to the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee. Ledeen sprang quickly to his defense but Franklin faces prosecution
next year and is most probably cooperating with prosecutor Fitzgerald.
Harold Rhode, the other American actor in this tragicomic affair, worked
the Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Department of Defense for Vice
President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Characterized
as a "counter-intelligence shop," OSP simply interpreted intelligence
in a manner that fit the need for evidence that Iraq had WMD. If the CIA
gathered data that said otherwise, OSP analyzed it differently or ignored
the facts and then reported to the vice president precisely what he wanted
to hear. Rhode also was the liaison between Ahmed Chalabi, the convicted
embezzler the Bush administration was using to feed information to them
and Judy Miller about the distortions and lies required to fuel the rush
to war.
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- No great extrapolation is necessary to assume that OSP,
sitting inside the CIA, got early word that Joseph Wilson was being dispatched
to Niger to investigate the sale of low-grade uranium to Iraq. Rhode needed
only to pick up the phone and call the vice president's chief of staff
Scooter Libby, who would tell his boss and Karl Rove. How hard is it for
even Republicans to believe, at this point, that Rove is capable of launching
a plan to discredit Wilson and punish him by exposing his wife? Rove and
his boss were not simply in danger of losing the prime cause for the war;
they faced an even graver political wound of being discovered as covert
agents who defrauded the government and the public.
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- I have seen the spawn of Rove's tortured mind and watched
a hundred of his political scams unfold and I am confident I know how this
one played out. Rove might have brought it up with his fellow big brains
in the White House Iraq Group, a propaganda organization set up to disseminate
information supporting the war. There was likely a consensus to move the
plan to smack down Wilson out of the White House. Rove always keeps a layer
of operatives between himself and the person he gets to pull the trigger.
Libby was probably told to manage it out of the VP's office to protect
the president because Karl always takes care of his most prized assets.
Libby then likely ordered John Hannah and possibly David Wurmser to call
the ever-friendly Judy Miller at the New York Times and columnist Robert
Novak to give them Valerie Plame's identity. Rove knew that Miller would
call Libby of Aspen for confirmation and his old friend Novak was certain
to call Rove who, as an unidentified senior White House official, would
confirm the identity on background only. Because Novak is a partisan gunslinger,
he wrote more quickly than Miller and when she saw the firestorm his story
created, she backed off and has since been trying to cover for herself
and Libby. Miller's later claim that she cannot remember who gave her the
"Valerie Flame" name is as much dissembling as Rove's unconvincing
argument that he "forgot" he met with Time reporter Matt Cooper.
Karl Rove can remember precinct results from 19th century presidential
elections. He neither forgets nor forgives.
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- There you have it, Mr. Prosecutor. To quote an unreconstructed
former Republican presidential candidate, "You know it. I know it.
And the American people know it." We expect you also to have sufficient
evidence to prove all of this. There are many of us who are on the verge
of losing faith in our democracy. We are convinced that there are people
within the highest ramparts of American government who are willing to put
our country at great risk to advance their geo-political vision. We want
our country back. And all we have left is the power of the law. From what
we know, you are the right man come forth at the right time.
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- Prove to us we still live in a democracy and a nation
of laws.
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