Wednesday, July 20, 2005

As we go Roving around ...

"Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, 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."  - Old Man Bush 04/26/99

There are lots of articles out there right now about the Valerie Plame/Karl Rove case.  I wanted to mention a few of the ones I've come across that seem significant.

Summaries

Joe Conason, in the first of what I hope will be many articles in his role doing investigative pieces for the American Prospect, has provided a long background piece on the Plame/Rove case: "Rove on the Ropes", The American Prospect Online, Jul 17, 2005.  (As of this posting, the article is behind subscription; but the Prospect makes most of its print articles available for free online after a couple of weeks.)

Throughout his adult life, the president’s chief political adviser and deputy chief of staff has escaped responsibility for the ugly and blatant tactics that have marked his career in campaigns and in public office. Awful things have happened to people foolish or unfortunate enough to fall within the shadow of his wrath, from the Alabama judge whose life was ruined by whispers of pedophilia to Senator John McCain, whose wife and child were smeared by anonymous calls during the South Carolina primary in 2000, to former anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, whose decades of national service were erased by a sudden wave of baseless vilification -- and, of course, to Vietnam War hero John Kerry, who found his service record dirtied up just enough to neutralize the Democrat’s advantage as a combat veteran over George W. Bush during last year’s presidential election.

The man whom the president calls “Turd Blossom” and “Boy Genius” is a powerful bully. Fear of retribution has stifled those who might have revealed his secrets. He has enjoyed the impunity of a malefactor who could always claim, however implausibly, deniability -- until now.

Whether Rove faces legal consequences for his role here will hinge on whether any official, including Rove, violated theIntelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, which is carefully drawn to exclude prosecution of unintentional and innocent disclosures of an agent’s identity -- or whether any official lied or obstructed justice in the course of this investigation.

On the legal question, Rove deserves the presumption of innocence as much as any American. But he must also be judged according to a broader standard based on the values that Bush once promised would be paramount in this presidency: honor, integrity, and character. To understand how Rove smudged those values, it is necessary to review the essential facts of the case, and to clear away the disinformation broadcast by the White House and its media allies over the past two years.

Conason has the following to say on the defense made by Rove's partisans that Plame sent Wilson on the Niger trip out of some kind of dubious nepotism.  And, in doing so, underlines the seriousness of the White House's blowing her cover as a CIA undercover operative:

But, in fact, the former ambassador’s trip was no “boondoggle” authorized by his wife. Valerie Plame Wilson lacked the authority to send her husband to Niger, and he profited in no way from his unpaid, weeklong sojourn in one of the poorest desert countries on earth, thousands of miles from his wife and 2-year-old twins. She did not even need to suggest his name to her colleagues or superiors because he had completed a similar mission for the agency four years earlier. But there would have been nothing wrong with such a suggestion anyway. The CIA officers who sent Joseph Wilson to Niger knew he was more than qualified to undertake that task.

Plame, for her part, had worked undercover in Europe and the United States to prevent weapons proliferation, earning professional accolades and promotions. Prior to the leak, her closest friends and neighbors believed that she was an “energy analyst” for a fictional company called Brewster-Jennings Associates.

By disclosing her actual job, Novak ended her career -- and potentially endangered her and every contact known to have done business with her. The uproar over her “outing” led to public and editorial demands for an investigation to discover which “senior administration officials” were responsible for this outrageous and arguably illegal act. Rove was an obvious suspect. For one thing, Rove and Novak had a history: Rove was fired from George Bush Senior’s 1992 re-election campaign for supposedly leaking a story about a close Bush Senior confidant -- to Novak (Rove and Novak deny it). Such suspicions reflected more than mere speculation. Shortly after the Novak column appeared, Rove had reportedly called Hardball host Chris Matthews with the message “Wilson’s wife is fair game.” The stunned Matthews, who has since refused to comment on the incident,apparently had the decency to call Wilson and inform him of Rove’s ominous remark.

He does warn about being careful in jumping to conclusions at this point:

It is certainly possible that Karl Rove committed no crime and that he is not, as his attorney insists, a “target” of Fitzgerald’s investigation. He may have spoken truthfully during his three reported appearances before the grand jury and in his earlier interviews with the FBI. The prosecutor could be seeking instead to indict the person or persons who may have violated the intelligence-identities law by revealing Plame’s identity to Rove and others in the White House -- and to squeeze Rove into providing names, dates, and details of the plot against the Wilsons.

Yet whether he trespassed a single narrowly drawn statute or not, he deserves to be held accountable for his irresponsible and cowardly attack on a woman who has devoted her life to her country, exemplifying the patriotism he and the president so often extol for their own partisan purposes. Rove may never be indicted, but he certainly revealed Plame’s identity -- and encouraged the vile campaign against her and her husband.

This is a much shorter news summary, which includes an update on one of the newer pieces of information made public: Naming a covert operative by Linda Feldman Christian Science Monitor 07/19/05

Q. What is the relevance of a State Department memo that was on Air Force One when Bush went to Africa in 2003?

The memo included information about Wilson's investigation in Africa and his wife's role at the CIA. (Wilson had said she recommended him for the Africa investigation.) That trip by Bush, which included traveling press, may have been a point of contact between administration officials with access to classified information, including that memo, and journalists interested in Wilson's accusations.

That memo could prove to be important in the legal case against Rove.  If he learned of Plame's identity through that memo but later gave a different version under oath, he could be in for a perjury charge.  (See below.)

Documents

Here are a couple of important items in this story.  The original Wilson op-ed:  What I Didn't Find in Africa  by Joseph C. Wilson 4th New York Times 07/06/03.  Also available at CommonDreams.org.

Senate Intelligence Committee Report of July 7, 2004, that deals with the Wilson report: Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (*.pdf file) pp. 39-47 by the report numbering; it appearss on p. 49 of the *.pdf document in my browser.

This is the text of a letter dated 07/18/05 (*.pdf file.) just sent by 11 former intelligence officials to Congress on the Plame case.

Other articles

Ivo Daalder points out that for all the comma-dancing on the Niger yellowcake business that is going on even now, that the Iraqi Survey Group under David Kay came to some definite conclusions (Niger and Uranium - The Evidence TPM Cafe 07/15/05):

The fundamental problem facing the administration and its supporters is that on this, as on all other question relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, they were, in the words of David Kay, who initially headed the ISG, "all wrong."

A March, 2003 article showing the kinds of doubts that were in the air:Some Evidence on Iraq Called Fake by Joby Warrick Washington Post 03/08/03.

A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations' chief nuclear inspector said yesterday in a report that called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq's secret nuclear ambitions. Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed "not authentic" after careful scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the U.N. Security Council.

ElBaradei also rejected a key Bush administration claim -- made twice by the president in major speeches and repeated by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday -- that Iraq had tried to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use in centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Also, ElBaradei reported finding no evidence of banned weapons or nuclear material in an extensive sweep of Iraq using advanced radiation detectors. "There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities," ElBaradei said.

Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away -- including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said. "We fell for it," said one U.S. official who reviewed the documents.

A spokesman for the IAEA said the agency did not blame either Britain or the United States for the forgery. The documents "were shared with us in good faith," he said. The discovery was a further setback to U.S. and British efforts to convince reluctant U.N. Security Council members of the urgency of the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Powell, in his statement to the Security Council Friday, acknowledged ElBaradei's findings but also cited "new information" suggesting that Iraq continues to try to get nuclear weapons components.

Notice that this article appeared just before the invasion of Iraq, which occurred later that month.  If Congress or the mainstream press had treated the information with the seriousness it deserved, war might have been avoided.  But it's too late now.

Finally, here's an article by Ray McGovern, one of the 11 former officials who sent the letter to Congress.  As the title indicates, he has some pretty strong suspicions about others who may have been involved in the Plame leak and the fake yellowcake-from-Niger documents: Cheney Wasn’t Involved Either. Right. by Ray McGovern, CommonDreams.org 07/20/05.  He describes the background of the administration's reaction to Joe Wilson's criticism:

As noted earlier, the main motivation of the White House campaign to discredit the Wilsons had to do with the particular lie that Joseph Wilson exposed and the essential role it played in the administration’s plans. The lie was that Iraq was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons and that, despite Iraq’s inability to deliver such weapons on the U.S., this somehow posed a “grave and gathering” threat. The plans were to use that ominous specter—replete with the “mushroom cloud”—to deceive Congress into approving war on Iraq. The problem was that not even the obsequious George Tenet could come up with evidence that could withstand close scrutiny.

U.N. inspectors and U.S. intelligence knew that Iraq’s nuclear program had been destroyed after the Gulf War and there was no persuasive evidence that Baghdad was moving to reconstitute it. Even the imagery analysts, whom former CIA director John Deutch gave away to the Pentagon in 1996, could not come up with the evidence needed, despite very strong incentive to please their boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

What a welcome windfall, then, when a deus ex machina (and it appears we can take “machina” literally) suddenly arrived on the scene in early 2002 in the form of a report alleging that Iraq was seeking uranium in the African country of Niger. Since Iraq had no other use for uranium, the closely coordinated White House-10 Downing Street spin machine went into high gear, playing up the report as proof that Baghdad was reconstituting its nuclear weapons development program. The intelligence analysts had to hold their noses—not only because of the dubious sourcing but because the substance of the report made little sense. They knew (and Wilson confirmed) that all the uranium mined in Niger is controlled by a French-led international consortium that exercises super-strict control over exports from Niger. It just couldn’t happen.

Provenance and likelihood be damned. The White House now had a “report” that could be used effectively with Congress and our incredibly credulous press. Tenet could be counted on to keep his nose-holding professionals out of sight. And the nature of the source could be kept from experts like those at the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) until after the vote in Congress. The Iraq-seeking-uranium-from-Africa canard assumed such prominent importance in the administration’s case that, even when it was forced to admit that a forgery was involved, the story simply could not be dropped altogether—either in Washington or in London.

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