The Cult That's Running the Country
Joseph Wilson blasts the secretive neoconservative cabal that plunged
America into a disastrous war, in this excerpt from his new book.
Editor's note: In July 2003, former ambassador Joseph Wilson revealed
in a New York Times piece that President Bush's assertion that Saddam
Hussein was seeking to acquire uranium from the African nation of
Niger was false and should have been known by the Bush administration
to be false. Wilson was in a position to know: He himself had been
sent by the CIA (acting at the behest of Vice President ***** Cheney)
to Niger to investigate the claims, which he reported were baseless.
Coming on top of other reports that the Bush White House had
cherry-picked intelligence to make a distorted case for war, Wilson's
piece caused major political damage to the Bush administration. It
reacted by attempting to discredit and punish Wilson. On July 14,
2003, syndicated columnist Robert Novak dutifully revealed that
Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA operative, writing that "two
senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested
sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report."
This article, the first of two excerpts from Wilson's new book, "The
Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Betrayed My
Wife's CIA Identity," begins as Wilson confronts the media and
political firestorm that erupted after Novak's column appeared.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Joseph Wilson
May 3, 2004 | After making the Sunday rites of passage on the big
television news shows, I began cutting back such appearances. I had
answered all the questions that were being asked and had nothing else
to offer on the subject. It did not matter, as the Right renewed its
attack: I was a publicity seeker. The president lied and the White
House had attacked my wife, but I was a publicity seeker. Of course,
if it was publicity I was after, my campaign was a flop. Prior to
Novak's article, I was still known as the last American diplomat to
have met with Saddam Hussein. Now I had become Mr. Valerie Plame.
"Welcome to the Dennis Thatcher club," a husband of a well-known woman
said to me, a reference to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's
spouse.
The press coverage was very positive toward Valerie and me. So was the
outpouring of support from across the political spectrum, from Pat
Buchanan on the right to Jesse Jackson on the left. Serious people
understood what had happened. It was only a small cadre of right-wing
zealots and the White House itself that continued trying to spin the
story and make of it something it was not. I was particularly offended
when President Bush, asked about the leak on October 7, claimed, "I
want to know the truth." However, eager to place the responsibility
upon journalists rather than shoulder it himself, he added, "You tell
me: How many sources have you had that's leaked information, that
you've exposed or had been exposed?" He added, "Probably none," making
it clear that his question had been only a rhetorical one. Bush capped
off his comments that day with a statement that infuriated me, and
many people whom I later heard from: "This is a large administration
and there's a lot of senior officials ... I have no idea whether we'll
find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to
your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers."
His lack of genuine concern stunned and disappointed me.
More than four years earlier, on April 26, 1999, the president's
father, not only a former president but also former Director of CIA,
spoke at the ceremonial rededication of CIA headquarters in Langley,
Virginia, which would be known henceforth as the George Bush Center
for Intelligence. Referring to those who would expose clandestine
officers, he said, "I have nothing but contempt and anger for those
who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in
my view, the most insidious of traitors." For his son to pretend he
was a mere onlooker in his own administration was dishonorable.
As of this writing, in February 2004, two years have passed since I
traveled to Niger. Who could have imagined that journey would lead
through such a maze of intrigue, so much deceit on the part of a
presidential administration, and such enormous harm to my wife? It has
been an existential rollercoaster ride, and the wheels have not yet
come to rest. Even so, there are lessons the experience has taught me,
and some lessons that I believe the country can learn, from this
tragic war of choice that should never have been undertaken, and from
the unprecedented disclosure that my wife was an undercover CIA
officer.
When in May 2002 I entered the debate on how the United States should
confront Iraq, I did so with a mounting sense of unease about the
direction in which America was being led by the Bush administration. I
began to speak out because I believed that our armed forces would be
exposed to unnecessary risk if the administration insisted on marching
in to war with the phony coalition then being assembled. I also feared
that our credibility and international reputation would suffer greatly
and that our position as the global superpower would be undermined,
threatening much of the good our foreign policy had achieved since
World War II.
Moreover, the suspect rationales being articulated by the
administration -- weapons of mass destruction, ties to international
terrorism with a global reach, and the possibility that Saddam might
provide al Qaeda with WMD -- just didn't, in my estimation, add up to
a legitimate imminent threat or even a grave and gathering danger.
For thirteen months, I never mentioned my trip to Niger in public
appearances, in the newspaper commentaries I published, or even in
private conversations, until the State Department spokesman claimed
that the United States had been fooled by the forged documents. The
findings from the Niger mission had not altered the fact that
disarmament was a legitimate goal for the international community to
pursue, even if force was required to achieve it. It was only when it
became clear to me that the claim in the president's State of the
Union address referred to Niger, and therefore was untrue, that I had
no choice but to insist that my government correct the record.
It was not an act of courage, as some have generously suggested; nor
was it a partisan act, as critics have howled. It was a civic duty,
pure and simple. If there ever are occasions when our government is
justified in lying to its citizens, this was not one of them. Our
democracy required that the administration be called to account.
I resisted going public for several months, however, in the futile
hope that after it became apparent there was no truth to the Niger
uranium claim, and once serious questions were raised in the media,
somebody in the administration would come forward and take
responsibility for the falsehood. I had no interest in attaching my
name and face publicly to any such revelation; I had seen the harm
done to bearers of bad tidings in Washington. Even after Condoleezza
Rice falsely asserted on "Meet the Press" that "maybe someone knew
down in the bowels of the Agency" that the evidence cited in the State
of the Union address was suspect, I still hesitated to set the record
straight publicly, although I was becoming more determined that the
lies be corrected somehow.
A few days after Rice's interview, the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees announced that they were going to look into the prewar
intelligence, including the uranium claim. I called the staffs of both
committees and volunteered to brief them about my trip and findings. I
ended up briefing them separately within a few days of each other in
mid-June, disclosing what I knew to the appropriate oversight bodies.
A week after those briefings, I learned from a journalist that my name
was soon to be made public. I finally decided to write the story
myself, and called back David Shipley at the New York Times to accept
his offer of space on their op-ed page.
I knew that my credibility would be challenged the moment I went
public, and I made preparations to defend it. I was not going to let
the rabid ankle-biters of the right deny me a voice in the debate or
impugn my integrity. I had earned the right to be heard, the same
right enjoyed by other responsible citizens. I spoke out confident in
the belief that our democracy remains strong precisely because we have
a long and proud tradition of citizens challenging our government when
it lies to the people.
However, for all the insults I knew I would suffer, I never expected
the White House itself to do anything like what it did: come after my
wife.
The disclosure of her identity was unprecedented, and the Grand Jury
will decide if it was a criminal act. Whether convictions are obtained
or not, it was unquestionably beneath the standards of conduct that we
have every right to demand from our public servants. But in their
attacks on us, the administration was firing at the wrong targets. I
had not put the sixteen words in the president's mouth; somebody on
his staff had, and that is where he should have been taking aim;
Valerie had not done anything wrong. And when somebody leaked the fact
she was undercover, thereby putting a national security asset out of
commission at a time of war, the president should have demanded swift
action to remove the offender from his post. Yet, as in the case of
the sixteen words, the president once again demonstrated more loyalty
to his staff than they had shown to him. To this day, no one at the
White House has apologized for the unwarranted attacks on Valerie and
me. And to this day, the person who leaked her name evidently remains
in a position where he enjoys the trust of President Bush.
An example of the administration's shifting rationales for the war is
evident in the varying importance officials placed on the allegation
that Iraq had purchased uranium, or tried to. In sharp contrast to the
president's dire warnings in his September 2002 speech to the U.N., in
which he stated, "Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be
able to build a nuclear weapon within a year," and the subsequent
charge that Iraq was actively seeking to purchase uranium from Africa,
Condoleezza Rice tried to downplay the importance of the Niger
allegation after it came out that it was false. "It is ludicrous to
suggest that the president of the United States went to war on the
question of whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa," Dr.
Rice said on FOX News Sunday on July 13, 2003. "This was part of a
very broad case that the president laid out in the State of the Union
and other places." But the Niger fabrication was the only allegation
of an Iraqi attempt to secure uranium that the administration ever put
forward to substantiate the president's charge.
As it turned out, Rice was actually right -- if not for the reason she
meant -- that the Niger allegation was unimportant, because this war
was never really about WMD. Paul Wolfowitz, in an interview with
Vanity Fair, acknowledged as much when he said, "The truth is that for
reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we
settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was
weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." (The Pentagon
released its own transcript of the interview after they were unhappy
with news coverage of the revelations in the published article, but
the two versions do not differ on this point.)
This enterprise in Iraq was always about a larger neoconservative
agenda of projecting force as the means of imposing solutions. It was
about shaking up the Middle East in the hope that democracy might
emerge -- what I had heard Charles Krauthammer call "the coming ashore
in Arabia." Whatever one may conclude about the desirability of using
our military to bring democracy to the Arab world, the fact is that we
went to war without first testing the thesis in serious national
debate.
Democratization is a noble goal. I was involved in democratization
efforts for most of my diplomatic career. It is a long and hard road
that requires institution-building and a significant investment on the
part of the local population in a new and different system of
governance that is often at odds with tradition. The best description
I have heard for the process is that it is like a fine English lawn:
you must seed it, you must water it, and if you want it to look really
good, you must roll it -- for six hundred years. It is not a task that
comes naturally to our military, however excellent that institution
is.
In perhaps the most eloquent and scathing critique of the consequence
of the administration's having lied about why it believed it needed to
go to war, Zbigniew Brzezinski observed in an October 2003 speech that
during the Cuban missile crisis, Secretary of State Dean Acheson
offered to show French President Charles de Gaulle satellite photos of
Soviet nuclear missile installations in Cuba to support President
Kennedy's request for support in the event we had to go to war. De
Gaulle replied that he did not need to see the photographs, as
President Kennedy had given his word and his word was good. Who would
now ever take an American president at his word, in the way that de
Gaulle once did?
So we find ourselves in a disastrous quagmire in a distant land, with
our troops suffering fatal wounds and disabling injuries every week,
even as we employ ever greater force to subdue an increasingly
disgruntled people. And just when we think the numbers of casualties
may finally be starting to subside, with our uniformed commanders
assuring us that the corner has been turned, that the number of
insurgent attacks is at last decreasing, the very lethality of the
attacks may in actuality be increasing.
The neoconservatives who have taken us down this path are actually
very few in number. It is a small pack of zealots whose dedication has
spanned decades, and that through years of selective recruitment has
become a government cult with cells in most of the national security
system. Among those cells are the secretive Office of Special Plans in
the Department of Defense (reportedly now disbanded) and a similar
operation in the State Department that is managed in the office of
Under Secretary for Disarmament John Bolton.
Pat Lang -- with whom I had frequently exchanged views on Iraq policy
-- served his country first as an army officer, rising to the rank of
colonel, then as an intelligence officer in the Defense Intelligence
Agency in charge of the Middle East before retiring. He once told me
about when he was recruited for possible membership in the group.
He described to me a visit, during the administration of the first
George Bush, from an elderly couple who dropped in on him unannounced
one afternoon at his Pentagon office. They had come, they said, at the
suggestion of Paul Wolfowitz, then the Under Secretary of Defense for
Policy, who had told them that Colonel Lang was a bright fellow. They
introduced themselves as Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, professors
from the University of Chicago, and they made themselves at home for a
brief chat.
Albert Wohlstetter, one of the most influential strategists of nuclear
weapons policy in the second half of the twentieth century until his
death in 1997, was a mentor to Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. In the
1970s he had been an architect of the first effort to bring outside
analysts into traditional institutions like the CIA to "reassess" the
Soviet threat. This "Team B" effort resulted in the Reagan
administration's use of wildly exaggerated claims about Soviet
rearmament to justify huge American defense spending increases. By the
end of the decade, Wohlstetter had expanded his definition of
America's strategic role to include the Middle East. He advocated that
the U.S. extend its security umbrella to the Persian Gulf on the
grounds that even if no Soviet hand could be seen behind the Islamic
revolution in Iran of 1979, the situation there still represented a
threat to American interests in the Middle East and Pakistan.
During the Wohlstetters' conversation with Lang, they began to probe
the colonel for his views and beliefs. Mrs. Wohlstetter, partner to
her husband in academia and in political philosophy as well as in
life, pointed out sections in books they had written and asked Lang
for his views on the theories espoused in them.
It became apparent to Lang that he was being auditioned -- though, as
it happened, not to the satisfaction of the Wohlstetters. They soon
packed up their books and left.
Lang said that in later conversations with a number of uniformed
officers, he learned that many of them had been auditioned as well
and, like him, had been found wanting. However, one who did pass the
test was former Navy Captain William J. Luti. In the Bush
administration he holds the post of Deputy Under Secretary of Defense
for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Luti also supervised the
Office of Special Plans, described in a seminal 2003 New Yorker
article by Seymour Hersh as "a separate intelligence unit ... in the
Pentagon's policy office."
It was through these special offices that so many of the rumors,
gossip, and unsubstantiated intelligence about Iraq were passed
directly to senior White House officials, notably Vice President
Cheney, and were accepted without first being subjected to the
rigorous analysis of the $30-billion-a-year intelligence community.
American intelligence, which routinely sees and sifts thousands of
bits of information daily, has had years of experience developing an
analytical capability that can assess precisely whether the
information we are receiving is fact or fiction. Short-circuiting this
process -- or, in the vivid term Hersh adopted for the title of his
disturbing article, "stovepiping" information directly into
policy-makers' hands -- is dangerous. Addressing his investigation
directly to Luti's enterprise, Hersh added: "This office, which
circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency,
stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials" in
the administration.
President Bush could fundamentally change the direction of his
administration by firing fewer than fifteen senior officials,
beginning with those signatories of the Project for the New American
Century and those currently holding government posts who signed a 1998
letter that urged President Clinton to wage war on Iraq. They are
clustered at the National Security Council (NSC), in the Defense and
State Departments, and within Vice President Cheney's own parallel
national security office. That particular little-known organization --
not accountable to Congress and virtually unknown to the American
people -- should be completely dismantled. Never in the history of our
democracy has there been established such an influential and pervasive
center of power with the ability to circumvent longstanding and
accepted reporting structures and to skew decisionmaking practices. It
has been described to me chillingly by a former senior government
official as a coup d'etat within the State. That's all it would take
-- firing fewer than fifteen officials, and the scuttling of Cheney's
questionable office -- to alter this administration's radical course.
But President Bush would have to want to make these changes. The fact
that he has utterly failed to do so suggests that one popular notion
about this president -- that he has delegated foreign policy to his
"prime minister," ***** Cheney, and that the president is somehow
manipulated by him -- is doubtful. Even as the criticism mounts and
the failure of the war policy becomes ever more evident with every
attack on American interests in Iraq, the president refuses to make
changes in his lineup. In fact, as one former intelligence officer
suggested to me, President Bush may himself be a neoconservative
"recruit," and now an active leader of the radical movement rather
than a passive follower unable to block it.
The president is not powerless and does not need to demonstrate, as
Senator Richard Lugar pleaded on Meet the Press in October 2003: "The
president has to be president. That means the president over the vice
president and over these secretaries [of State and Defense]." On the
contrary, he is the president and he is directing his vice president
and his cabinet secretaries to do his bidding. He is responsible for
what has been wrought in his name.
In recent months I have tried to piece together the truth about the
attacks on myself and the disclosure of Valerie's employment by
carefully studying all the coverage and by speaking confidentially
with members of the press who have been following the story. A number
of them have been candid with me in our private conversations but
unwilling to speak publicly with the same candor. When I have asked
why the reporting on the story has not been more aggressive, I have
received responses that are very disturbing. A reporter told me that
one of the six newspeople who had received the leak stated flatly that
the pressure he had come under from the administration in the past
several months to remain silent made him fear that if he did his job
and reported on the leak story, he would "end up in Guantanamo" -- a
dark metaphor for the career isolation he would suffer at the hands of
the administration. Another confided that she had heard from reporters
that "with kids in private school and a mortgage on the house," they
were unwilling to cross the administration.
In the halcyon days of an aggressive investigative press corps,
journalists saw it as their job "to afflict the comfortable and
comfort the afflicted," as the great Chicago journalist Finley Peter
Dunne put it early in the twentieth century. What does it say for the
health of our democracy -- or our media -- when fear of the
administration's reaction preempts the search for truth? Mark Fineman,
the late Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent who did a profile on
me in Baghdad in 1990, used to call his passion for the truth the
search for the "dirtball" stories -- the stories that lay in the soft
underbelly of the public pronouncements, the stories behind the story.
Clearly, many stories lie behind the story of the attacks on my
family, but they have prompted very little "dirtball" reporting. I am
disappointed by the reluctance of the press to make waves and get to
the very bottom of the real story.
From everything I have heard, the truth may be found at the nexus
between policy and politics in the White House. Whoever made the
decision to disclose Valerie's undercover status occupies a position
where he -- and I believe it is a "he" because Robert Novak's own
statements employ the male pronoun exclusively -- has access to the
most sensitive secrets in our government, and a political agenda to
advance or defend. In gumshoe parlance, he's got the means and he's
got the motive. Only a few administration officials meet both of these
criteria, and they are clustered in the upper reaches of the National
Security Council, the Office of the Vice President, and the Office of
the President.
After my appearance on CNN in early March 2003, when I first asserted
that the U.S. government knew more about the Niger uranium matter than
it was letting on, I am told by a source close to the House Judiciary
Committee that the Office of the Vice President -- either the vice
president himself or, more likely, his chief of staff, Lewis
("Scooter") Libby -- chaired a meeting at which a decision was made to
do a "workup" on me. As I understand it, this meant they were going to
take a close look at who I was and what my agenda might be.
The meeting did not include discussion of how the president or his
senior staff might address the indisputable, if inconvenient, fact
that the allegation I had made was true. In other words, from the very
beginning, the strategy of the White House was to confront the issue
as a "Wilson" problem rather than as an issue of the lie that was in
the State of the Union address. That time frame, from my CNN
appearance in early March, after the administration claimed they "fell
for" the forged documents, to the first week in July, makes sense, as
it allows time for all the necessary sleuthing to have been done on
us, including the discovery of Valerie's name and employment.
The immediate effect of the workup, I am told by a member of the
press, citing White House sources, was a long harangue against the two
of us within the White House walls. Over a period of several months,
Libby evidently seized opportunities to rail openly against me as an
"***** playboy" who went on a boondoggle "arranged by his CIA wife"
-- and was a Democratic Gore supporter to boot.
So what if I'd contributed to the Gore campaign? I had also
contributed to the Bush campaign. So what if I'd sat on a Gore foreign
policy committee? I had had no political role whatsoever in the
campaign. Moreover, my trip to Niger was taken more than two years
after the Gore–Bush election, and I had not even been involved in any
partisan activities during the campaign. And it was not until the
spring of 2003, several months after the president's State of the
Union address, that I contributed to the Kerry campaign and began to
work with his foreign policy committee.
Would a staunch Republican have disregarded the facts and offered
findings from Niger that were different than mine? Intelligence
collection is not party-specific. Perhaps a Republican would have
allowed the lie to pass without comment, but if so, that is a
Republican problem. The national security question is always the same:
Did we go to war under false pretenses? I am not prepared to argue
that Republicans per se endorse the practice of government officials
lying and distorting the facts, but it may be that Vice President
Cheney and his chief of staff do.
The man attacking my integrity and reputation -- and, I believe, quite
possibly the person who exposed my wife's identity -- was the same
Scooter Libby who, before he came into the new administration, was one
of the principal attorneys for Marc Rich, ex-fugitive. Rich is the
commodities trader who was convicted of having traded petroleum with
Iran in violation of sanctions imposed on that country by the United
States after the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran and the
taking of more than a hundred American hostages by supporters of
Ayatollah Khomeini. Libby is a consummate Republican insider who has
bounced back and forth between government posts and his international
law practice. He first worked on the Rich case in the mid-1980s, after
a stint in the State Department. From 1989 to 1993, Libby worked for
Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon, before returning to the task of trying
to obtain a legal settlement for his fugitive client.
In the late nineties, Libby also participated in the preparation of
the Project for the New American Century's seminal document,
"Rebuilding American Defenses," which became the neoconservative
blueprint for national security policy, much of which has been
implemented in the aftermath of 9/11. This ardent neoconservative is a
leading participant in the network of hidden cells that funneled so
much disinformation to our political decision makers outside normal
channels. He is one of a handful of senior officials in the
administration with both the means and the motive to conduct the
covert inquiry that allowed some in the White House to learn my wife's
name and status, and then disclose that information to the press.
The other name that has most often been repeated to me in connection
with the inquiry and disclosure into my background and Valerie's is
that of Elliott Abrams, who gained infamy in the Iran–Contra scandal
during the first Bush administration. Abrams had been convicted in
1991 on two charges of lying to Congress about illegal government
support of the Nicaraguan contra rebels. He was pardoned in 1992 by
President George H. W. Bush. How unsurprising it would be if Abrams,
an admitted perjurer and a charter member of the neoconservative
movement, has engaged in unethical or criminal behavior in yet another
presidential administration.
According to my sources, between March 2003 and the appearance of my
article in July, the workup on me that turned up the information on
Valerie was shared with Karl Rove, who then circulated it in
administration and neoconservative circles. That would explain the
assertion later advanced by Clifford May, the neocon fellow traveler,
who wrote that Valerie's employment was supposedly widely known. Oh,
really? I am not reassured by his statement. Indeed, if what May wrote
was accurate, it is a damning admission, because it could have been
widely known only by virtue of leaks among his own crowd.
After the appearance of Novak's article, the subsequent "pushing" of
the story by the White House communications office -- and by Karl Rove
-- guaranteed that the allegation would at some point take center
stage in the press and would sweep the story behind the sixteen words
into the wings. Rove's strategy appears to have been simple -- change
the subject and focus attention on Valerie and me instead of the White
House -- but it proved to be seriously flawed. A week after Novak
reported the story that the administration pushed to him, David Corn
reported that a federal crime might have been committed, and I
conveyed that opinion on the Today show. I am absolutely certain that
Rove and company would have continued trying to convince the public
that Valerie and I were motivated by partisanship and somehow
responsible for the president's error -- ridiculous as that seems --
had it not been for the fact that they discovered the outing was quite
possibly illegal. Apparently, according to two journalist sources of
mine, when Rove learned that he might have violated the law, he turned
on Cheney and Libby and made it clear that he held them responsible
for the problem they had created for the administration. The
protracted silence on this topic from the White House masks
considerable tension between the Office of the President and the
Office of the Vice President.
The rumors swirling around Rove, Libby, and Abrams were so pervasive
in Washington that the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan,
was obliged to address them in an October 2003 briefing, saying of
Rove: "The president knows he wasn't involved. . . . It's simply not
true." McClellan refused to be drawn into a similar direct denial of
Libby's or Abrams's possible involvement, however. Later
interpretations of the line being taken by the White House spokesman,
according to members of the press who have spoken with me, indicate
that the administration's defense is extremely narrow: the leakers and
pushers of the story did not know the undercover status of Valerie
Plame, and therefore, though they may have disclosed her name, they
did not commit a crime.
Time will tell if that defense -- which strikes me as sophistry and a
legal refuge for scoundrels -- holds up. Indeed, if the administration
has no firm knowledge as to who might have leaked Valerie's name, why
would McClellan, and whoever drafted his talking points, address the
matter so precisely and try to stay so strictly within the letter of
the Intelligence Identities Protection Act? Ignorance of my wife's
undercover status may exculpate the leakers and pushers from
violations under that act, but as a congressional letter of January 26
to the General Accounting Office makes clear, other laws may have been
broken, including statutes relating to the handling of classified
material. Even the Patriot Act may have been violated, if Sam Dash's
interpretation of that law is correct.
In fact, senior advisers close to the president may well have been
clever enough to have used others to do the actual leaking, in order
to keep their fingerprints off the crime. John Hannah and David
Wurmser, mid-level political appointees in the vice president's
office, have both been suggested as sources of the leaks. I don't know
either, though at the time of the leak, Wurmser, a prominent
neoconservative, was working as a special assistant to John Bolton at
the State Department. Mid-level officials, however, do not leak
information without authority from a higher level. They would have
been instruments, not the makers, of decisions.
Whether the motivation behind the leak was to discredit me or to
discourage intelligence officials from coming forward, or both, is
immaterial at this stage. What matters is that, as of this writing,
the senior administration officials who took it upon themselves to
protect a political agenda by exposing a national security asset are
still in place. They still occupy positions of trust; they continue to
hold full national security clearances. The breach of trust between
the administration and its clandestine service will not be healed
until they are exposed and appropriately punished.
That no real outrage has been expressed by either the president or
Republicans in Congress raises the question of whether our secrets are
safe in this administration's hands. By the end of February 2004,
efforts to launch congressional inquiries had been voted down in three
House committees. Henry Hyde, Republican chairman of the International
Relations panel, claimed, "It would be irresponsible for the committee
to ... jeopardize an ongoing criminal investigation." On the contrary,
according to congressional sources of mine, Republicans, pressured by
the White House, have simply refused to exercise oversight
responsibility on this national security matter.
It's a far cry from the days when the House Government Reform
committee, chaired by Indiana congressman Dan Burton, held frequent
hearings on alleged Clinton administration misdeeds. At a time when
all experts on national security agree that we need to strengthen our
ability to collect human intelligence, the unwillingness of some to
seriously address this act of betrayal is surely damaging that effort.
But as with all cover-ups, such as Watergate and Iran-Contra, the
revelation of the whole truth in this matter will likely be a long
time coming, and have repercussions none of us can anticipate.
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