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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Bush's right-hand man is dispatching his troops to smear Joe Wilson -- and save himself. He may win in Washington, but the special prosecutor will have the last word.
Jul 14, 2005 | This is Karl Rove's war. From his command post next to the Oval Office in the West Wing of the White House, he is furiously directing the order of battle. The Republican National Committee lobs its talking points across Washington, its chairman forays the no-man's-land of CNN. Rove's lawyer, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial board are sent over the top. Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay man the ramparts, defending Rove's character.
For two years, since the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the disclosure of the identity of an undercover CIA operative, President Bush and his press secretary, Scott McClellan, have repeatedly denied the involvement of anyone in the White House. "Have you talked to Karl and do you have confidence in him?" a reporter asked Bush on Sept. 30, 2003. "Listen, I know of nobody," he replied. "I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action."
Bush backed himself into that corner because of a sequence of events beginning with the ultimate rationale he offered for the Iraq war. Public support for the war had wavered until the administration asserted unequivocally that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire and build nuclear weapons. Its most incendiary claim was that he had tried to purchase enriched yellowcake uranium in Niger. An Italian magazine, Panorama, had received documents appearing to prove the charge. Former ambassador Joseph Wilson was secretly sent by the CIA to investigate, and he found no evidence to substantiate the story. The CIA subsequently protested inclusion of the rumor in a draft of a Bush speech, and Bush delivered it on Oct. 7, 2002, without it.
But a month earlier, a British white paper had mentioned the Niger rumor. And in his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." These 16 notorious words had already been proved false, however (debunked by three separate reports from administration officials, which were apparently ignored ahead of Bush's speech). On March 7, 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that the Niger documents were "not authentic." The following day, the State Department concurred that they were forgeries. The invasion of Iraq began on March 20.
After the war began, the administration refused to acknowledge those 16 words were false. To set the record straight, Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article on July 6, 2003, in the New York Times titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa." It was the first crack in the credibility of the administration's case for the war, suggesting that the underlying intelligence had been abused, distorted and even forged. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice later admitted, "It was information that was mistaken." And CIA Director George Tenet said the lines "should never have been included in a text written for the president."
A week after Wilson's Op-Ed appeared, on July 14, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote that Wilson's "wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report." The revelation of Plame's identity may be a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 -- a felony carrying a 10-year prison sentence. Apparently, the release of Plame's identity was political payback against Wilson by a White House that wanted to shift the subject of the Iraq war to his motives.
On July 30, the CIA referred a "crime report" to the Justice Department. "If she was not undercover, we would not have a reason to file a criminal referral," a CIA official said. On Dec. 30, the Justice Department appointed Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney for northern Illinois, as the special prosecutor.
Fitzgerald's investigation stalled when two reporters he subpoenaed, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of the New York Times, initially refused to testify. But Time handed over Cooper's notes on his conversation with Rove to the prosecutor, and Cooper eventually decided to cooperate. Miller chose to remain in contempt of court and has been imprisoned until the grand jury is dissolved. With the publication of Cooper's memo to his editors two weeks ago, the White House was asked about whether the president would adhere to its own "highest standards," as McClellan had put it, and fire anyone involved in outing Plame. But since Monday, both McClellan and Bush have refused to comment on the investigation. While the White House stonewalls, Rove has license to run his own damage-control operation. His surrogates argue that if Rove did anything, it wasn't a crime. There's no cause for outrage, except at Joe Wilson, and now, in a turn of the screw, Matt Cooper. The inhabitants of the political village should busy themselves with their arts and crafts. No one's status will be endangered or access withdrawn, it is implied, if they do nothing rash. They should simply accept that exposing undercover CIA operatives is part of politics as usual. Return to your homes. Stay calm.
