| Topic: |
Science > Abortion |
| User: |
"james g. keegan jr." |
| Date: |
13 Jul 2005 07:11:00 PM |
| Object: |
Rove's Leak Points to Bush Conspiracy |
Rove's Leak Points to Bush Conspiracy
By Robert Parry
July 11, 2005
A key national security principle for dealing with top-secret
information, such as the identity of undercover CIA officers, is strict
compartmentalization, often called “the need to know” – which raises the
question why George W. Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove would
know anything about the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.
The answer to that mystery – why was Rove involved – may be more crucial
to unraveling who was behind the illegal leaking of Plame’s name and the
subsequent cover-up than even the identity of which Bush officials passed
the information to right-wing pundit Robert Novak for his infamous column
on July 14, 2003.
But rather than focusing on how and why Rove knew about Plame, the latest
controversy around the case has centered on whether Rove explicitly used
her name in an interview with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper three
days before Novak’s column.
Rove’s lawyer Robert Luskin told the Washington Post that his client
didn’t identify Plame by name, only mentioning her in giving Cooper
guidance about who was responsible for authorizing a fact-finding trip by
Plame’s husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger in
February 2002. [Washington Post, July 11, 2005]
According to an internal Time e-mail (obtained by Newsweek), Cooper
informed his editor that Rove offered a “big warning” not to “get too far
out on Wilson” and that “KR said” the Niger trip was authorized by
“wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency (CIA) on wmd issues.”
[Newsweek, July 18, 2005, issue]
During Wilson’s 2002 trip to Niger, the ex-ambassador discovered that
claims about Iraq trying to buy yellowcake uranium were almost certainly
bogus. But Wilson’s findings – which were later corroborated by United
Nations officials – would remain politically sensitive because they
undercut Bush’s assertions about Iraqi nuclear ambitions, a central
rationale for invading Iraq in March 2003.
On July 6, 2003, three months after the U.S.-led invasion, Wilson
disclosed his Niger findings in a New York Times op-ed article that
represented an early crack in the president’s credibility on the Iraq
War.
Bush Spin Machine
The Bush spin machine quickly whirled into action, even though it was
clear by July 2003 that Bush was wrong about the existence of large
caches of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as well as about an active
nuclear weapons program. Still, the goal in summer 2003 was to discredit
Joe Wilson.
It was in that context that the secret about Plame’s covert role as a CIA
officer working on WMD issues was somehow delivered to the White House.
From there, the sensitive fact, which also could have jeopardized the
lives of other operatives who were cooperating with Plame, was fashioned
into a public-relations attack on her husband.
Rather than keep the secret under tight control, Bush’s White House
bandied it about as a way to question Wilson’s manhood, as a guy who
needed his wife’s intervention to get him a job – although Plame appears
only to have mentioned her husband as one Africa expert suitable for the
Niger assignment.
To professional U.S. intelligence officers, the notion of sharing such a
precise secret – the identity of an undercover CIA officer – with a
spinmeister like Rove is anathema.
From a national security viewpoint, it also doesn’t matter much whether
Rove used Plame’s name. He certainly gave Time magazine enough
information – that Joe Wilson’s wife was a CIA officer – to unmask her
identity with a little bit of research.
But again, the national news media seems to have missed the forest for
the trees. By concentrating on whether Rove specifically spoke Plame’s
name to Cooper, the media is missing the significance of the fact that a
political operative like Rove would have a hand in this operation at all.
The larger point is that senior White House officials, possibly including
Bush, revealed the identity of a covert CIA officer as part of what
appears to be a conspiracy to discredit Wilson in retaliation for telling
the truth in his op-ed column.
The key incriminating fact in this mystery is that Rove had no reason to
know who Plame was, except as part of a public relations attack against
her husband. It was a classic case of dirtying up – or punishing – the
messenger for delivering unwanted news.
It also fits with the long-running neoconservative strategy of using
“perception management” techniques to “controversialize” critics and keep
the American people in a constant state of confusion. [For more on the
evolution of those strategies, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege:
Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]
Identifiable Harm
In the Plame case, there also was identifiable harm to national security
– the outing of a covert CIA officer working on WMD issues – and a
possible violation of a federal law that bars willful disclosure of
secret agents. That is why federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was
assigned to investigate the matter two years ago.
At minimum, the White House behavior indicates gross negligence in
handling a sensitive secret. But if the case were simply negligence,
heads probably would have rolled long ago. Any administration serious
about protecting national security would have carried out stern
disciplinary actions even as Fitzgerald’s investigation continued.
In the Iran-Contra Affair, for instance, Ronald Reagan fired aides Oliver
North and John Poindexter on Nov. 25, 1986, the day the scandal was
revealed, rather than wait for the conclusion of a criminal probe.
On April 30, 1973, as the Watergate scandal was unfolding, Richard Nixon
ousted chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, domestic policy chief John
Ehrlichman and White House counsel John Dean. Nixon famously promised “no
whitewash at the White House.”
By contrast, George W. Bush has taken no known disciplinary action
against anyone for letting the identity of a covert CIA officer leak out.
Rove played a prominent role in Bush's reelection campaign and has since
been promoted to deputy White House chief of staff.
Nor has Bush done anything to discourage his right-wing supporters from
denigrating Wilson, who gets routinely mocked as a flaky self-promoter or
a partisan Democrat.
These orchestrated attacks on Wilson have continued despite the fact that
U.S. government investigations – including several ordered by Bush
himself – have corroborated the absence of a pre-invasion Iraqi nuclear
weapons program.
So, this long-term pattern of White House behavior suggests that
negligence isn’t the whole story. Rather it looks as if the dissemination
of Plame’s identity may have crossed the line into a criminal conspiracy
at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Unanswered Questions
For two years now, what has been lacking from the White House is a
coherent explanation of how the information about Plame’s identity got
from the cloistered world of the CIA to White House meetings and then
into the hands of political adviser Rove.
Long ago, there should have been answers to the following questions:
--What national security purpose was served by giving Karl Rove a
sensitive secret that, if leaked, could endanger the lives of covert
intelligence operatives?
--Who attended White House meetings at which Wilson’s disclosures and
Plame’s identity were discussed? How was Plame’s identity brought into
these talks? By whom?
--Was George W. Bush present at any of these meetings? As the president,
who is ultimately responsible for decisions about national security
secrets, did Bush say anything about Wilson and Plame? If so, what did he
say and to whom?
--Did Bush or anyone else in the White House order Rove to disparage
Wilson?
In a healthy democracy, the news media would have demanded answers before
Election 2004, rather than focusing primarily on the plight of several
journalists caught up in demands for testimony from prosecutor
Fitzgerald.
Ironically, it was the caving in by Time magazine last week that has
opened the door slightly into the long-running White House cover-up of
the Plame case. But still the major news media misses the bigger picture.
The answer to the Plame mystery is not the Watergate advice of “follow
the money” or even the obvious question of who spilled the beans to
Novak. Instead, the route to the heart of this mystery is to follow the
trail from who knew Plame’s identity at the CIA through the White House
meetings to Karl Rove.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/071105.html
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