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| Leak of name shows small-minded motive |
Itsdb |
06/13/06 |
By Jim Wright
FORT WORTH - As in the sordid revelations that brought down the Nixon administration in 1974, one of the saddest aspects of the secret White House calls that outed special agent Valerie Plame Wilson is the sheer pettiness of the scheme.
Now that top white House political adviser Karl Rove himself has been identified as the one who spoke to Time magazine, identifying Joseph Wilson’s wife as a secret CIA agent, the stupid venture takes on a new dimension of apparent officialdom.
It wasn’t just some crackpot, low-level zealot who took it on himself to embarrass Wilson and his wife. It was deliberate policy! And for what? Why would anyone of Rove’s level consider it worth risking serious censure for violating an unambiguous law? Just to punish, hurt, disadvantage or discredit two civil servants?
Was it worth it? Was Wilson’s professional conclusion that Saddam Hussein never tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger so damning that it required this kind of heavy-handed retaliation against Wilson’s family?
One other question: Is it even possible that Rove was unaware of the law prohibiting the knowing public disclosure of a covert U.S. agent?
That law is not unclear. Under penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a $50,000 fine, it forbids anyone with authorized access to classified information from intentionally disclosing the identity of covert agents.
Congress passed that law in 1982 after the violent death of an undercover agent who’d been fingered to our Cold War opposition by a disgruntled American who maliciously published the agent’s name and location, along with those of several other secret U.S. operatives.
Nobody thinks the White House would wish any such lamentable fate for Valerie Wilson (or Plame, if you prefer her professional name).
Rove reportedly says he didn’t speak her actual name to the Time reporter, referring to her simply as “Wilson’s wife.”
Yet it wasn’t just an accidental slip of the tongue that blew this secret agent’s cover. It was a deliberate plan concocted by a person or persons in the White House to try to embarrass or discredit the former ambassador.
Calls went out (whether from Rove or other functionaries) not only to Time but also to columnist Bob Novak, reporter Judith Miller of The New York Times and who knows what other scoop-hungry journalists, all planting the story that the ambassador’s wife was an undercover CIA agent.
Surely the White House wasn’t trying to get Valerie Wilson shot. But the leakers did not blanch at destroying her usefulness to the country and thus ruining her career.
Soon after everyone began awakening to the truth that Iraq had no WMDs (our initial justification for the pre-emptive U.S. invasion), the ambassador’s official investigation had revealed that Saddam’s reported nuclear intrigue with Niger was only another exaggerated scare.
This whole flap was, on its face, a rather clumsy effort to sully and discredit the reputations of Wilson and his wife.
And to what end? A blunt warning to others in government that, if they value their careers, they’d better check their independent judgment at the door and get with the program? (When we say there are WMDs, then find WMDs! Are you on the team or not?)
All this is painfully reminiscent of the Nixon days. The Enemies List. The tawdry break-ins at the Democratic headquarters, and at a private psychiatrist’s office to scoop up personal files of a man who opposed the Vietnam War. The use of federal agencies - the FBI and the IRS - to hound and harass private citizens who disagreed with the administration. No, this one leaking incident doesn’t rise to that level. Some say, “Tempest in a teapot,” or “Small potatoes.”
Still, President Bush would do himself and the country a favor if he’d insist that everyone in the White House read the transcript of the 1973 House Judiciary Committee debate on the Nixon administration’s “dirty tricks.”
It is a recitation of petty things that, taken together, dealt with grand principle. The principle is that the powers of government are a sacred trust, never to be employed to punish or embarrass one’s domestic political opponents.
The very pettiness of the deed itself is, and should be, an embarrassment to us all.
Jim Wright is a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. He wrote this essay for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
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I've been waiting since July of last year to post Wright's drivel...and this:
By JOHN SOLOMON , 06.13.2006, 07:35 AM
Top White House aide Karl Rove has been told by prosecutors he won't be charged with any crimes in the investigation into the leak of a CIA officer's identity, his lawyer said Tuesday.
Attorney Robert Luskin said that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald informed him of the decision on Monday, ending months of speculation about the fate of one of President Bush's closest advisers. Rove testified five times before a grand jury.
Fitzgerald has already secured a criminal indictment against Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
"On June 12, 2006, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald formally advised us that he does not anticipate seeking charges against Karl Rove," Luskin said in a statement.
"In deference to the pending case, we will not make any further public statements about the subject matter of the investigation," Luskin said. "We believe the special counsel's decision should put an end to the baseless speculation about Mr. Rove's conduct."
Fitzgerald has been investigating whether senior administration officials intentionally leaked the identity of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame in retribution because her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, sharply criticized the administration's pursuit of war in Iraq.
Rove, who most recently appeared before a grand jury in April, has admitted he spoke with columnist Robert Novak and Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper in the days before they published Plame's name in July 2003.
Rove, however, did not originally tell prosecutors about his conversation with Cooper, only revealing it after his lawyer discovered a White House e-mail that referred to it.
Fitzgerald was investigating whether Rove lied or obstructed justice in failing to initially disclose the conversation. The presidential aide blamed a faulty memory and sought to testify before the grand jury after finding the e-mail to correct his testimony.
The threat of indictment had hung over Rove, the man President Bush dubbed "the architect" of his re-election, even as Rove was focusing on the arduous task of halting Bush's popularity spiral and keeping Democrats from capturing the House or Senate in November elections.
Fitzgerald's investigation has been underway since the start of the 2004 election, and the decision not to indict Rove is certain to cheer Republicans concerned about Bush's low approval ratings and the prospects of a difficult 2006 congressional election.
"The fact is this, I thought when you had people like Howard Dean and (Sen.) Harry Reid presuming that he was guilty," Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman told Fox News Channel's "Fox and Friends" show Tuesday morning.
Democrats, on the other hand, had no reason to cheer the development.
"Good news for the White House, not so good news for America," Dean, the Democratic Party chairman, said Tuesday on NBC's "Today" show.
Rove has been at Bush's sides since his days as Texas governor and was the architect of Bush's two presidential election victory. A political strategist, Rove assumed new policy responsibilities inside the White House in 2005 as deputy chief of staff.
However, as part of the shake-up brought by new White House chief of staff Joshua Bolton, Rove shed those policymaking duties earlier this year to return to full time politics.
Fitzgerald's case against Libby is moving toward trial, as the two sides work through pretrial issues such as access to classified documents.
Libby, 55, was charged last October with lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury about how he learned and when he subsequently told three reporters about CIA officer Valerie Plame. He faces five counts of perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice.
Plame's identity was exposed eight days after her husband, Bush administration critic and former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, alleged that the U.S. government had manipulated prewar intelligence to exaggerate an Iraqi nuclear threat.
With Rove's fate now decided, other unfinished business in Fitzgerald's probe focuses on the source who provided Washington Post reporter Bob Woodwind information about Plame.
Woodwind says his source, who he has not publicly identified, provided the information about Wilson's wife, several weeks before Novak learned of Plame's identity. The Post reporter, who never wrote a story, was interviewed by Fitzgerald late last year.
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Let the spin begin. |
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