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| Rove Rage |
jnlomonte |
08/07/05 |
From The Dallas Morning News, 8/7/2005
Ex-GOP big Tom Pauken wonders why conservatives aren't demanding answers.
Why have so many conservatives rushed to the defense of White operatives Karl Rove and and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who are under investigation for their roles in the possibly illegal leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name?
This scandal began in 2002, when the CIA sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire WMD materials there. He concluded the charges were untrue. President Bush subsequently cited Niger as a "casus belli" in his 2003 State of the Union address, stating that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." After this, Mr. Wilson went public disputing the administration's claims.
Unnamed Bush officials then launched a counterattack against Mr. Wilson, challenging his credibility. Part of that counterattack possibly included the "outing" of Ms. Plame as a CIA operative in stories about the controversy. We now know that the president's top political advisor, Mr. Rove, and Mr. Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, talked to at least one reporter, Time magazine's Matthew cooper, about Ms. Plame's work as a CIA analyst.
Most of the attention to date has been focused on Mr Rove's participation in the campaign to discredit Mr. Wilson because Mr. Rove has a long history of using "slash and burn" tactics to go after political foes. But theinvolvement of Mr. Libby--national security advisor to Mr. Cheney and a close associate of former Defense official Paul Wolfowitz, widely credited as the architect of the Iraq war--may be more significant.
That's because one of the main charges against Mr. Wolfowitz and other administration neoconservative hawks is that they used faulty intelligence, information they knew to be of dubious credibility, to sell the president and Congress on the war. It is a perennial problem in the intelligence business when policymakers have reached a conclusion already and only want "intelligence" that will bolster their position. Any intelligence that throws into doubt the conclusions they already have reached has to be discarded or discredited. That's why Mr. Wilson's credibility had to be undermined.
Predictably, the controversy has taken a partisan tone, with Democrats and liberals using the issue to go after Mr. Rove and the president. Meanwhile, a number of conservatives publications, talk show hosts and spokesmen like GOP chairman Ken Mehlman have adopted a "party line" that goes like this: "Ambassador Wilson and his wife are partisan Democrats, and Ms. Plame wasn't on covert status at the time her identity was revealed."
But a recent Washington Post report revealed taht as he was boarding Air Force One, Secretary of State Colin Powell was given a classified document after Mr. Wilson's op-ed ran that pointed out his wife's role at the CIA. That document was marked "S" for secret, indicating that her status was still covert. Seven days after Mr. Powell received it, conservative columnist Robert Novak outed Ms. Plame as a CIA operative.
Was there a connection? Conservatives should be clamoring for answers.
Lest we forget, it was conservatives who pushed the hardest for passage of the 1982 statute designed to protect U. S. spies. Known as the "Philip Agee" law, it was put in place to discourage people like Mr. Agee (a disaffected leftist who had been in the CIA) from outing clandestine CIA operatives and jeopardizing operations. Whatever Ms. Plame's status, administration officials had no business playing fast and loose with her identity as a CIA agent. Ex-CIA analyst Larry Johnson has a point when he wonders why no Republican lawmaker has had the courage to stand up and "speak out against them."
National security is too important for partisan gamesmanship. This principle is even more important the observe when it comes to waging war, the gravest act any nation can undertake. Patriotic conservatives ought to be concerned abour whether Mr. Bush, Congress and the American people may have been misled into the Iraq war by influential persons manipulating intelligence data to justify that action. One conservative Republican congressman, Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina, believes he was duped and is now calling for an Iraq exit strategy.
Isn't it in our national interest to fine out who was responsible for that misinformation rather than simply take the Republican party line on the Plame affair? Conservatives must decide which is more important: the good of our country or the good of the Republican Party.
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Tom Pauken, a Dallas businessman, served in the Reagan administration and was a military intelligence officer in Vietnam. He can be emailed at twpauken@sbcglobal.net
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Isn't it interesting that all rightwing conservatives aren't kneejerk Rove apologists.
John |
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