”PlameGate” Is Hardly a Summer Squall
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jul 18 (IPS) - While to people living outside the Washington
”Beltway,” the current affair over the disclosure by top White House officials
of the identity of a covert intelligence officer may seem somewhat esoteric, the
stakes could not be higher.
It is not just that Karl Rove, Pres. George W. Bush's top political adviser, and
Vice Pres. Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis ”Scooter” Libby, may have
violated a 1982 law to protect U.S. spies and could face criminal indictments,
at least for perjury or obstruction of justice.
The case may also prove to be one more string -- albeit a very central one --
that, if pulled with sufficient determination, could well unravel a very tangled
ball of yarn, and one that would confirm recent revelations in the British press
-- the so-called Downing Street memo -- that the Bush administration was ”fixing
the facts” about the alleged threat posed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in
order to grease the rails to war.
It may also expose how a close-knit group of neo-conservatives and Republican
activists both inside and outside the administration also waged war against
professionals in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the State Department
in the run-up to war precisely because, as experts, they repeatedly came up with
new ”facts” that contradicted the propaganda of both the White House and its
backers. Facts that somehow either had to be ”fixed” or discredited.
If special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and his grand jury find that the White
House and its ”non-governmental” supporters conducted a deliberate campaign to
discredit Amb. Joseph Wilson, in part by revealing the identity of his CIA
spouse, Valerie Plame, many Republican lawmakers, who are increasingly nervous
and tight-lipped about the case, will be forced to distance themselves from Bush
and the Iraq war, making it far more difficult for him to rally support for new
adventures, such as air strikes of covert actions against Iran.
”This case is about Iraq, not Niger,” wrote the New York Times' Frank Rich in a
widely noted column Sunday entitled ”Follow the Uranium,” a reference to
Wilson's trip in February 2002 to Niger to follow up on an intelligence document
-- since found to have been forged -- that appeared to show that Hussein had
bought a large quantity of yellowcake uranium from that African nation,
presumably for his alleged nuclear weapons programme.
”The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons,” Rich went on. ”The
real culprit ...is not Mr. 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
9/11. That's why the stakes are so high...”
Wilson, of course, first suggested that that ”fixing facts” was precisely what
the administration was doing when he wrote his Jul. 6, 2003 Times op-ed. The
article recounted how he had been sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate the
yellowcake report, found that such a transfer was ”highly unlikely,” and
reported his conclusions orally to CIA debriefers after his return.
He also wrote that he originally understood that Cheney had asked the CIA that
such a mission be carried out and thus assumed it had been reported back up to
the vice president's office.
The fact that references to Hussein's alleged acquisition of yellowcake kept
popping up in Bush's and Cheney's speeches over the following months, however,
prompted him to pose the key question in his article: ”Did the Bush
administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes
to justify an invasion of Iraq?” Eight days later, Washington Post columnist
Robert Novak, citing ”two senior administration officials” as sources, not only
publicly identified Plame as Wilson's wife, but also stressed that Plame, whose
expertise in the agency was weapons of mass destruction (WMD), had proposed her
husband for the mission in part because he had served in Niger. In fact, as a
result of new information that has come to light over the past week, it is now
known that both Rove and Libby told or confirmed to at least two other reporters
before Novak's article appeared that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and that
she had played a role in his selection.
That the aim of these contacts was to discredit Wilson also now appears beyond
question. Indeed, citing sources close to the grand jury investigation, the Los
Angeles Times reported Monday that Rove and Libby were ”especially intent on
undercutting Wilson's credibility,” to the point where it caused some
consternation in the White House.
The White House ”off-the-record” campaign against Wilson was supplemented by a
very loud ”on-the-record” effort by prominent neo-conservatives and their news
media, including the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, The Weekly Standard,
and The National Review Online.
The last kicked it off Jul. 11 with an article by Clifford May, the president of
the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD) and the only person who was
neither a journalist nor an administration official who claims to have known
about Plame's relationship to Wilson before Novak reported about it.
While May, a former communications director for the National Republican
Committee, did not identify Wilson's relationship with Plame, he included a
litany of ”talking points” about Wilson's objectivity. ”(H)e's a pro-Saudi,
leftist partisan with an ax to grind,” May declared.
A week later, May published a second article in which he broadened his attack to
the CIA in general, calling the selection of ”a retired, Bush-bashing diplomat”
for such a sensitive mission a ”dereliction of duty,” suggesting the choice
showed either incompetence or a deliberate effort to derail the administration's
march to war.
It was a familiar theme that he and other neo-conservative critics of the
agency, such as Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, Newt Gingrich, and
the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol -- all of whom serve on FDD's board of
directors and were outspoken supporters of the war -- have voiced frequently
over the past several years, and particularly in the run-up to the war itself.
Indeed, just as lower level CIA officials were discussing sending Wilson to
Niger, top agency officials several stories higher were already discussing how
to implement a new Top Secret intelligence order from Bush ordering the CIA to
support the U.S. military in achieving regime change in Iraq, according to the
Bob Woodward's 'Plan of Attack.'
And just as the CIA debriefers were presumably compiling their assessment of the
yellowcake report based in part on Wilson's mission after his return in March
2002, Cheney was declaring publicly for the first time that Hussein was
”actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time.”
With the CIA having been given its marching orders and Cheney squarely on the
record, top agency officials saw that Wilson's ”facts” would be unwelcome. Three
months before the Downing Street memo, the ”fix” was in, and it now appears that
Wilson's conclusions were never passed along to the vice president's office.
(END/2005)
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