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Bush's 'brain'
leaked: Did Bush know?
By Jim
Lobe
WASHINGTON - Battered by sagging poll
numbers, new doubts in the aftermath of the London
bombings about the effectiveness  of its "war on
terror" and no let-up in the bad news out of Iraq,
the White House has found itself this week
embroiled in yet another controversy, one that
threatens the credibility, if not the tenure, of
the man widely known as President George W Bush's
"brain".
Thanks to the disclosure of email
messages from a Time magazine reporter to his
editor, it is now known that, contrary to
categorical assurances by the White House two
years ago, Karl Rove, Bush's deputy chief of staff
and top political adviser, leaked the identity of
a covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
officer, the subject of a criminal investigation
by a federal grand jury.
At the time, Bush
himself had assured reporters that he would fire
anyone in his administration found to be
responsible for the "outing" of Valerie Plame, the
wife of ambassador Joseph Wilson, a retired
diplomat who had published an article in the New
York Times debunking Bush's assertions in the
run-up to the Iraq war that Baghdad had tried to
buy uranium yellowcake from Niger, presumably as
part of a nuclear weapons program.
But
now, with Rove "outed" as one of the sources of
the leak, the White House is refusing to comment
about the implications, insisting, in contrast to
its assurances about Rove's innocence as recently
as 14 months ago, that it would be wrong to say
anything about the case while the grand jury
investigation continues.
Bush himself
stoically ignored questions about Rove's fate that
were shouted at him by reporters during a very
brief photo-opportunity with a visiting foreign
dignitary on Tuesday. At the end of a cabinet
meeting in which Rove was discreetly seated in a
rear row on Wednesday, he announced, "This is a
serious investigation."
Top Democrats,
including Senate minority leader Harry Reid and
New York Senator Hillary Clinton, are now trying
to extract maximum political advantage, demanding
that Rove step down for breaching national
security and placing the lives of Plame, her
associates, and their agents in jeopardy.
While Rove is considered most unlikely to
leave, at least in the near term, the stakes are
high. Rove, whom Bush has referred to as "the
architect" of his electoral successes and, more
affectionately, as "boy genius", is widely
considered the president's most influential
adviser, and not just on political matters.
Neo-conservatives howled, for example,
when Rove, who has guided Bush's political career
from its outset, reportedly told top cabinet
officials in the fall of 2003 that there was to be
"no war in 2004", in order to ensure the
president's re-election.
"This president
does not want to lose Karl Rove," David Gergen, a
top political adviser to former presidents Ronald
Reagan and Bill Clinton, told the Los Angeles
Times. "Rove is his right arm."
The
controversy began almost exactly two years ago -
almost three months after the US invasion of Iraq
- when Wilson published a column in the New York
Times on July 6, 2003, recounting his 2002 trip to
Niger as a CIA consultant precisely to investigate
intelligence reports that Iraq had tried to buy a
large quantity of yellowcake from the country.
After a week talking to sources in the
country, Wilson, who had served a good part of his
diplomatic career in Francophone Africa, including
Niger, concluded that the reports were untrue and
reported his conclusions back to the CIA and the
State Department.
Despite his findings,
the allegation that "Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa", made its way into Bush's state of the
union address in January 2003, less than two
months before the invasion.
Noting the
apparent anomaly, Wilson, who wrote that he was
confident his findings had been communicated to
the relevant policymakers, particularly Vice
President Dick Cheney's office which, he was told,
had expressed particular interest in the Niger
reports, argued that, "If ... the information was
ignored because it did not fit certain
preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate
argument can be made that we went to war under
false pretenses."
The article, which was
published at the moment when it first became clear
that US forces in Iraq faced a serious and growing
insurgency, received considerable attention, and,
within days, the White House conceded that the
inclusion in Bush's speech of the uranium claim
was a mistake.
On July 14, 2003, however,
Washington Post columnist Robert Novak published a
column in which he reported that Wilson had
traveled to Niger at the suggestion of his wife,
whom Novak not only identified by name, but also
described as "an agency operative on weapons of
mass destruction". He cited "two senior
administration officials" as his sources.
Several other Washington reporters came
forward shortly afterward, saying that they, too,
had been called by senior officials regarding
Plame's identity, apparently in an effort to
discredit Wilson's reporting by suggesting that
nepotism had played a role in his selection. None
of the reporters, however, identified their
sources by name.
Under a 1982 law, it is a
crime to knowingly disclose the identity of US
citizens working undercover for the CIA.
Democrats, the media and indeed some intelligence
veterans soon began clamoring for a criminal
investigation of the leak, particularly amid
evidence that it may have resulted in the agency's
closure of a major international
counter-proliferation operation that been running
for a number of years.
The Justice
Department initiated an investigation and, under
growing public pressure, reluctantly appointed a
special counsel, US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald,
to handle the case. Fitzgerald promptly empanelled
a grand jury and began taking testimony from
administration officials, including Rove. All
grand jury proceedings are secret, and remarkably
little has leaked out to date.
Reporters,
many of whom initially resisted testifying on the
grounds that conversations with sources were
confidential, were also subpoenaed to testify by
Fitzgerald, who has won a series of court
decisions holding that reporters do not have an
absolute right to withhold the identity of their
sources when a crime has been committed. It was in
that context that Time magazine turned over the
records of conversations held between its
reporter, Matthew Cooper, and White House
officials, including Rove.
According to
one email message obtained last week by Newsweek,
Cooper informed his editor that Rove had told him
four days before the Novak column was published
that Wilson's wife - whom he did not identify by
name - "apparently works" for the CIA and had a
role in selecting him for the Niger mission.
Rove's lawyer has since confirmed that
such a conversation took place but insisted that
his client had not done anything illegal, both
because Rove did not provide Plame's name, nor was
he aware that she was a covert officer.
In
addition, the attorney has also declared that Rove
has specifically waived the confidentiality of his
conversation with Cooper, thus permitting the Time
correspondent, who had been prepared to go to jail
rather than disclose his source, to testify before
the grand jury in the coming weeks.
While
Rove's waiver saved Cooper from going to jail,
another reporter, Judith Miller of the New York
Times, has been behind bars since last Wednesday
for refusing to cooperate with Fitzgerald's
investigation.
While her decision has been
hailed by many in the media as an act of integrity
and courage, others have noted that, in the run-up
to the Iraq invasion, Miller, who is considered
close to neo-conservative hawks in and out of the
administration, was the most consistent purveyor
in the elite media of stories about Iraq's alleged
weapons of mass destruction (WMD), based on the
accounts of sources provided by the Iraqi National
Congress and the Pentagon.
Given her close
association with the war hawks, her WMD expertise,
and the fact that she never wrote about Wilson or
his wife, some writers, notably William Jackson Jr
of the trade publication, Editor & Publisher,
have raised the question of whether she may have
been a source for, as well as a witness to,
disclosure of Plame's identity.
Another
prominent neo-conservative, Clifford May of the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, boasted
two years ago that he was told by two "former
government officials" of Plame's identity before
Novak published his column. May worked as a
reporter for the New York Times for 10 years
before becoming communications director for the
Republican National Committee, a post where he
knew Rove quite well.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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