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Frank Rich: To find Karl Rove, follow the uranium
By Frank Rich The New York Times
MONDAY, JULY 18, 2005
NEW YORK Well, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated
the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high
threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt
he trashed the agent, Valerie Plame, and her husband, Joseph Wilson.
We know this not only because of the celebrated e-mail note of Time
magazine's Matt Cooper, but also because of Rove's own history. Trashing
is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar
whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the
2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be
a drug addict (and McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the
1994 Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a
lesbian. The implication that Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man
beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with
previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is
that this time Rove got caught.
Even so, we shouldn't get hung up on him or the other minor figures.
In the end, this scandal is about the president of the United States. It
is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in
which all others, Rove included, are at most secondary players.
To see the main plot, you must sweep away the subplots, starting
with the Cooper e-mail. It has been brandished as a smoking gun by Bush
bashers and as exculpatory evidence by Bush backers (Rove, you see, was
just trying to ensure that Time had its facts straight). But no one knows
what this e-mail message means unless it's set against the avalanche of
other evidence, most of it secret, including what Rove said in three
appearances before the grand jury investigating the case. Therein lies the
rub, or at least whatever case might be made for perjury.
Another bogus subplot, long popular on the left, has it that Patrick
Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, gave Robert Novak, in whose column
Plame's name first appeared, a free pass out of ideological comradeship.
But Fitzgerald, both young (44) and ambitious, has no record of rabid
partisanship (his contempt for the news media notwithstanding) or known
proclivity for committing career suicide.
What's most likely is that Novak, more a common coward than the
prince of darkness he fashions himself to be, found a way to spill some
beans and avoid the fate of my colleague Judy Miller, who is in jail. That
the investigation has dragged on so long anyway is another indication of
the expanded reach of the prosecutorial web.
Apparently this is finally beginning to dawn on George W. Bush's
fiercest defenders and on Bush himself. Hence, last week's erection of the
stonewall manned by the almost poignantly clownish Scott McClellan, Bush's
press secretary, who abruptly rendered inoperative his previous statements
that any suspicions about Rove are "totally ridiculous." The morning after
McClellan went mano a mano with his tormentors in the White House press
room, the ardently pro-Bush New York Post ran only five paragraphs of a
wire-service story on Page 12. That conspicuous burial of what was
front-page news beyond Murdochland speaks loudly about the rising anxiety
on the right. Since then, White House surrogates have been desperately
babbling talking points attacking Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, as a
partisan and a liar.
These attacks, too, are red herrings. Wilson, his mission to Niger
to check out Saddam Hussein's supposed attempts to secure uranium that
might be used in nuclear weapons, and even his wife's outing have as much
to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh's theft of office cash has
to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in "Psycho."
This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the
American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit is not 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 Sept. 11. That's why the stakes
are so high: This scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war,
not the unmasking of a CIA operative who posed for Vanity Fair.
So put aside Wilson's February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that
matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is *****
Cheney. It was Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was
"actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time." The vice president went
on to repeat this charge in May on "Meet the Press," in three speeches in
August and on "Meet the Press" yet again in September. Along the way the
frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix.
By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the
United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a
softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But
hardly had Bush done so when, offstage, out of view of us civilian
spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being
challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson.
In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to
Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State
Department's caveat that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in
Africa," made public in a British dossier, were "highly dubious." A CIA
assessment, sent to the White House that month, determined that "the
evidence is weak" and "the Africa story is overblown."
As if this weren't enough, a State Department intelligence analyst
questioned the legitimacy of some mysterious documents that had surfaced
in Italy that fall and were supposed proof of the Iraq-Niger uranium
transaction. In fact, they were blatant forgeries. When Mohamed ElBaradei,
the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said as
much publicly in the days just before "shock and awe," his announcement
made none of the three network evening newscasts. The administration's
apocalyptic uranium rhetoric, sprinkled with mushroom clouds, had been
hammered incessantly for more than five months by then - not merely in the
State of the Union address - and could not be dislodged. As scenarios go,
this one was about as subtle as "Independence Day" and just as unstoppable
a crowd-pleaser.
Once we were locked into the war, and no WMDs could be found, the
original plot line was dropped with an alacrity. The administration began
its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs
about the uranium claims were lost "in the bowels" of the bureaucracy or
that it was all the CIA's fault or that it didn't matter anyway, because
there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the
administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly
trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to
Iraq, starting with the former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and the
former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.
Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Wilson is at most a
Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration's
drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he'd never gone to Africa.
But by overreacting in panic to his single op-ed piece of two years ago,
the White House has opened a Pandora's box it can't slam shut. Seasoned
audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one certainty
ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the
knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to
protect the king.
http://www.iht.com/protected/articles/2005/07/17/opinion/edrich.php
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| User: "Woodswun" |
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| Title: Re: To Find Karl Rove, Follow the Uranium |
18 Jul 2005 04:37:54 PM |
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Deep Blu wrote:
Frank Rich: To find Karl Rove, follow the uranium
By Frank Rich The New York Times
MONDAY, JULY 18, 2005
NEW YORK Well, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated
the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high
threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt
he trashed the agent, Valerie Plame, and her husband, Joseph Wilson.
We know this not only because of the celebrated e-mail note of Time
magazine's Matt Cooper, but also because of Rove's own history. Trashing
is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar
whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the
2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be
a drug addict (and McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the
1994 Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a
lesbian. The implication that Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man
beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with
previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is
that this time Rove got caught.
Like attracts like. The fact that Bush keeps stuck to such a piece of
work as this like glue, knowing what Rove is, is a better indicator of
Bush's true nature than anything else.
Woods
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