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'Plamegate' is no
summer squall
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - While to people living
outside the Washington "Beltway" the current
affair over the disclosure by top White House
officials of the identity of a covert intelligence
officer may seem somewhat esoteric, the stakes
could not be higher.
It is not just that
Karl Rove, President George W Bush's top political
adviser, and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of
staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, may have violated
a 1982 law to protect US spies and could face
criminal indictments, at least for perjury or
obstruction of justice.
The case may also
prove to be one more string - albeit a very
central one - that, if pulled with sufficient
determination, could well unravel a very tangled
ball of yarn, and one that would confirm recent
revelations in the British press about the
so-called Downing Street memo, which indicates
that the Bush administration was "fixing the
facts" about the alleged threat posed by Iraq's
Saddam Hussein in order to grease the rails to
war.
It may also expose how a close-knit
group of neo-conservatives and Republican
activists both inside and outside the
administration also waged war against
professionals in the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and the State Department in the run-up to
war, precisely because, as experts, they
repeatedly came up with new facts that
contradicted the propaganda of both the White
House and its backers. Facts that somehow either
had to be "fixed" or discredited.
If
special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and his
grand jury find that the White House and its
"non-governmental" supporters conducted a
deliberate campaign to discredit ambassador Joseph
Wilson, in part by revealing the identity of his
CIA spouse, Valerie Plame, many Republican
lawmakers, who are increasingly nervous and
tight-lipped about the case, will be forced to
distance themselves from Bush and the Iraq war,
making it far more difficult for him to rally
support for new adventures, such as air strikes or
covert actions against Iran.
"This case is
about Iraq, not Niger," wrote the New York Times'
Frank Rich in a widely noted column on Sunday
entitled "Follow the Uranium", a reference to
Wilson's trip in February 2002 to Niger to follow
up on an intelligence document - since found to
have been forged - that appeared to show that
Saddam had bought a large quantity of yellowcake
uranium from that African nation, presumably for
his alleged nuclear weapons program.
"The
real victims are the American people, not the
Wilsons," Rich went on. "The real culprit ... is
not Mr Rove but the gang that sent American sons
and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in
so doing diverted finite resources, human and
otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who
attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so
high ..."
Wilson, of course, first
suggested that "fixing facts" was precisely what
the administration was doing when he wrote his
July 6, 2003 Times op-ed. The article recounted
how he had been sent by the CIA to Niger to
investigate the yellowcake report, found that such
a transfer was "highly unlikely", and reported his
conclusions orally to CIA debriefers after his
return.
He also wrote that he originally
understood that Cheney had asked the CIA that such
a mission be carried out and thus assumed it had
been reported back up to the vice president's
office.
The fact that references to
Saddam's alleged acquisition of yellowcake kept
popping up in Bush's and Cheney's speeches over
the following months, however, prompted him to
pose the key question in his article: "Did the
Bush administration manipulate intelligence about
Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an
invasion of Iraq?"
Eight days later,
Washington Post columnist Robert Novak, citing
"two senior administration officials" as sources,
not only publicly identified Plame as Wilson's
wife, but also stressed that Plame, whose
expertise in the agency was weapons of mass
destruction, had proposed her husband for the
mission in part because he had served in Niger.
In fact, as a result of new information
that has come to light over the past week, it is
now known that both Rove and Libby told or
confirmed to at least two other reporters before
Novak's article appeared that Wilson's wife worked
for the CIA, and that she had played a role in his
selection.
That the aim of these contacts
was to discredit Wilson also now appears beyond
question. Indeed, citing sources close to the
grand jury investigation, the Los Angeles Times
reported on Monday that Rove and Libby were
"especially intent on undercutting Wilson's
credibility", to the point where it caused some
consternation in the White House.
The
White House "off-the-record" campaign against
Wilson was supplemented by a very loud
"on-the-record" effort by prominent
neo-conservatives and their news media, including
the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, The
Weekly Standard, and The National Review Online.
The last kicked it off on July 11 with an
article by Clifford May, the president of the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD)
and the only person who was neither a journalist
nor an administration official who claims to have
known about Plame's relationship to Wilson before
Novak reported about it.
While May, a
former communications director for the National
Republican Committee, did not identify Wilson's
relationship with Plame, he included a litany of
"talking points" about Wilson's objectivity. "He's
a pro-Saudi, leftist partisan with an ax to
grind," May declared.
A week later, May
published a second article in which he broadened
his attack to the CIA in general, calling the
selection of "a retired, Bush-bashing diplomat"
for such a sensitive mission a "dereliction of
duty", suggesting the choice showed either
incompetence or a deliberate effort to disrupt the
administration's march to war.
It was a
familiar theme that he and other neo-conservative
critics of the agency, such as Richard Perle,
James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, Newt Gingrich and
the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol - all of whom
serve on the FDD's board of directors and were
outspoken supporters of the war - have voiced
frequently over the past several years, and
particularly in the run-up to the war itself.
Indeed, just as lower-level CIA officials
were discussing sending Wilson to Niger, top
agency officials several stories higher were
already discussing how to implement a new top
secret intelligence order from Bush ordering the
CIA to support the US military in achieving regime
change in Iraq, according to the Bob Woodward's
Plan of Attack.
And just as the CIA
debriefers were presumably compiling their
assessment of the yellowcake report based in part
on Wilson's mission after his return in March
2002, Cheney was declaring publicly for the first
time that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear
weapons at this time".
With the CIA having
been given its marching orders and Cheney squarely
on the record, top agency officials saw that
Wilson's "facts" would be unwelcome. Three months
before the Downing Street memo, the "fix" was in,
and it now appears that Wilson's conclusions were
never passed along to the vice president's office.
(Inter Press Service) |
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