http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=29541
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
"PlameGate" Is Hardly a Summer Squall
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON (IPS) -
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, Pres. George W. Bush's top political
adviser, and Vice Pres. ***** Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, may have violated a 1982 law to protect U.S. 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 -- the so-called Downing Street memo
-- that the Bush administration was "fixing the facts" about the
alleged threat posed by Iraqi President 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 Amb. 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 of covert actions against
Iran.
"This case is about Iraq, not Niger," wrote the New York Times' Frank
Rich in a widely noted column 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 Hussein had bought a large quantity of
yellowcake uranium from that African nation, presumably for his
alleged nuclear weapons programme.
"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 that "fixing facts" was
precisely what the administration was doing when he wrote his Jul. 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 Hussein'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 programmes 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 (WMD), 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 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 Jul. 11 with an article by Clifford May, the
president of the Foundation for the Defence 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.
"(H)e'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 derail 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 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 U.S. 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 Hussein 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.
_____________________________________________________________
"The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons"
Harry
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