Plamegate: The Republicans Lied ... Again

The truth won, if your scoreboard is reality.

When the Bush rightwingers betrayed national security and blew the cover of a non-official cover CIA officer involved in keeping nuclear weapons technology out of the hands of other countries like Iran, The Nation's (posted 07/16/2003) David Corn (that crazy leftist, bring back HUAC) sounded the alarm.

As the first journalist to point out what amounts to treason, Corn deserves a few I-told-you-sos. And Corn sets the record straight in his piece, Plamegate Finale: We Were Right; They Were Wrong.

(Corn's) piece was the first to identify the leak as a possible White House crime and the first to characterize the leak as evidence that within the Bush administration political expedience trumped national security.

Continues Corn:

The column drew about 100,000 visitors to this website in a day or so. And--fairly or not--it's been cited by some as the event that triggered the Plame hullabaloo. I doubt that the column prompted the investigation eventually conducted by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, for I assume that had my column not appeared the CIA still would have asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak as a possible crime. But now that Fitzgerald's investigation is long done, the Scooter Libby spin-off is over (thanks to George W. Bush's total commutation of Libby's sentence), and Valerie Wilson has finally published her account, it seems a good time to say, I was right. And to add, where's the apology?

Good question. Notes Corn:

From the start, neocons and conservative backers of the war dismissed the Plame leak and subsequent scandal as a big nothing. Some even claimed that somehow former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and I had cooked up the episode to ensnare the White House. (Oh, to be so devilishly clever--and to be so competent.) But these attempts to belittle the affair (and to belittle Valerie Wilson) were based on nothing but baseless spin. As was--no coincidence--the Iraq war. In fact, the Wilson imbroglio was something of a proxy war for the debate over the war itself. In the summer of 2003, when the Plame affair broke, those in and out of government who had misled the nation into the war saw the need to spin their way out of the Wilson controversy in order to protect the false sales pitch they had used to win public support for the invasion of Iraq.

First they attacked Joe Wilson when he disclosed that he had gone to Niger in February 2002 for the CIA and had reported back that the allegation Saddam Hussein had been uranium-shopping there was highly dubious. Then when Valerie Wilson's CIA identity was exposed during the get-Wilson campaign, they pooh-poohed the leak. They subsequently spent years doing so.

Here's a brief list of Plame attacks I've published before:

* On September 29, 2003, former Republican Party spokesman Clifford May wrote that the July 14, 2003 Robert Novak column that disclosed Valerie Wilson's CIA connection "wasn't news to me. I had been told that--but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of."

* On September 30, 2003, National Review writer Jonah Goldberg huffed, "Wilson's wife is a desk jockey and much of the Washington cocktail circuit knew that already."

* On October 1, 2003, Novak wrote, "How big a secret was it? It was well known around Washington that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA....[A]n unofficial source at the agency says she has been an analyst, not in covert operations."

* On July 17, 2005, Republican Representative Roy Blunt ☼, then the House majority leader, said on Face the Nation, "This was a job that the ambassador's wife had that she went to every day. It was a desk job. I think many people in Washington understood that her employment was at the CIA, and she went to that office every day."

* On February 18, 2007, as the Libby trial was under way, Republican lawyer/operative Victoria Toensing asserted in The Washington Post, "Plame was not covert."

* In his recently published memoirs, Novak wrote of Valerie Wilson, "She was not involved in clandestine activities. Instead, each day she went to CIA headquarters in Langley where she worked on arms proliferation."

Corn could add Wisconsin's Jim Wigderson's flacking as well. Writes Wigderson:

* So to sum it up: we have a case of obstruction (under appeal) of a needless investigation to determine facts already known in a case where no crime has been found to have been committed where the dispute centers on two different recollections of one phone conversation which took place after the possible crime was committed, a reasonable chance of getting the conviction overturned, and an arguably excessive sentence which was to be imposed immediately while the appeal was pending. Under the circumstances President Bush’s decision (to commute), and the timing of it, are completely understandable

Bad flacking. Valerie Wilson was undercover; blowing her cover is against the law; and obstructing justice in federal investigations is no little crime. Corn writes:

For her part, Valerie Wilson, who left the CIA at the end of 2005, has only recently been able to challenge the purposefully misleading descriptions of her CIA tenure. Appearing before the House government oversight and reform committee in March, she testified the she was a "covert officer" who had helped to "manage and run operations." She said that prior to the Iraq invasion she had "raced to discover intelligence" on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "I also traveled to foreign countries on secret missions," she said under oath, "to find vital intelligence." She noted that she could "count on one hand" the number of people outside the CIA who knew of her spy work.

On Sunday, as she launched her new book, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, she appeared on 60 Minutes and repeated her case. Though the CIA has absurdly prevented her from acknowledging that she worked for the agency prior to 2002--she started there in 1985--Wilson told Katie Couric, "Our mission was to make sure that the bad guys basically did not get nuclear weapons." After her name appeared in the Novak column, she said, "I can tell you, all the intelligence services in the world that morning were running my name through their databases to see, 'Did anyone by this name come in the country? When? Do we know anything about it? Where did she stay? Well, who did she see?'...It puts in danger, if not shuts down, the operations that I had worked on." What damage was actually done by the leak remains a secret.

On 60 Minutes, Valerie Wilson said a damage assessment was conducted by the CIA but that she never saw it. She added, "I certainly didn't reach out to my old assets and ask them how they're doing, although I would have liked to have." That damage report has not been leaked. Nor has it been a subject of congressional interest--as far as one can publicly tell. in 2003, the Democrats in Congress who cared about the Plame leak were obsessed with calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor. That fixation proved to be a mistake.

A special prosecutor could only focus on criminal matters and could only disclose information necessary for a prosecution--rules that Patrick Fitzgerald would stick by. The Democrats never pushed for a congressional investigation that could have examined (and perhaps made public, even if in a limited fashion) key issues in the case, such as the consequences of the leak. Valerie Wilson said to Couric that the damage was "serious." The public ought to know if this is so. (When I once asked Senator Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, if he had any intention of probing the Plame leak, he said he no interest in doing so.)

That's the detestable thing about Republican flacks' political logic: It's so Soviet. Protect and lie first, and never admit a crime. If lies obstruct and cover up crimes, then the crimes did not occur, and the lies and obstruction are just politics against the enemies of the state anyway.

But why not say, the hell with the Republicans' corruption? Many progressives have at numerous points dumped the Democrats for far less. Concludes Corn:

It is true that at the end of the day, no one was charged with a crime for leaking information on Valerie Wilson. Patrick Fitzgerald decided that he could not prove in court--as he would have to under the law--that the leakers knew that Valerie Wilson was a covert officer. But Fitzgerald did pursue Libby and Rove for possibly lying to FBI agents and the grand jury investigating the leak. He nabbed Libby but, after much consideration, opted not to indict Rove.

Still, Rove was caught in a lie. Toward the start of the Plame affair, the White House declared that Rove was not involved in the leak, and Bush indicated that anyone who had leaked classified information would be dismissed.

But the White House statement regarding Rove was false (probably because Rove had misled White House press secretary Scott McClellan). Bush's promise was false, too, for Rove remained Bush's master strategist even after Isikoff published an email showing that Rove had leaked classified information about Valerie Wilson to Cooper.

The bottom line: this episode demonstrated that the Bush White House was not honest (the vice president's chief of staff was even convicted of lying to law enforcement officials), that top Bush officials had risked national security for partisan gain, and that White House champions outside the government would eagerly hurl false accusations to defend the administration.

So is anyone apologizing? For ruining Valerie Wilson's career? For perhaps endangering operations and agents? For lying about the leak? For misleading the public about Rove's role? For placing spin above the truth? Armitage did apologize (via a media interview) to the Wilsons. But no one else involved has. And no one--not Bush, not Cheney, not their aides, not their neocon confederates--has admitted any wrongdoing in this saga.It's like the war: false statements, false cover stories, and failure to concede the errors in judgment and action that have caused harm to national security. But the meta-narrative of Bush and his neoconservative allies is one of no apology, no surrender. They say and do what they must to shield themselves from the consequences of their actions. Reality be damned. What matters is what they can get away with. In the case of Valerie Plame Wilson, they did escape retribution. In the larger case of the Iraq war, they are still hoping to.

In the meantime, the Toensings, Novaks, Wigdersons, and Jonah Goldbergs and the like can be counted on to lie and slime until their hearts are content. It's their way.
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Israel and U.S. Heading the Catastrophic Way

The Jerusalem Post reports July 7 that our intrepid Secretary of State will begin a five-day visit to Israel on July 16.

The Post, under the ominous banner, The Iranian Threat, writes:

Iran is becoming increasingly dangerous, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday.

The secretary of state added that while US President George W. Bush was still committed to finding a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis, Iran should know that US policy included 'coercive elements,' as well.

Still committed to finding a diplomatic solution? Very funny. I wonder what the real agenda of Rice could be.

Meanwhile, the man who blew the whistle on the introduction of nuclear weapons into the Middle East by the region's most militant, aggressor nation that has killed 1,000s of innocents in the last 25 years has been imprisoned again for the crime of talking to the media and other human beings outside his native country—Mordechai Vanunu.

Vanunu's imprisonment occurred as the neocon American-Israeli war hawk, Lewis Libby, had his own imprisonment commuted by the corrupt American militarist, George W. Bush.

From CounterPunch:

When the Crimes of the White House are Unpunishable
Scooter Libby and Mordechai Vanunu

By DANIEL ELLSBERG

On the day that Scooter Libby's prison sentence was lifted by President Bush, Mordechai Vanunu was sentenced to prison, again, in Israel. In both cases, the underlying offense was the same: speaking to journalists. In each case, the nominal charges were otherwise. For Libby, lying under oath about the circumstances, thereby obstructing justice. For Vanunu, it was breaking a restriction laid upon him when he emerged from prison three years ago, after serving an earlier full sentence of eighteen years, also for speaking to journalists: he was ordered not to speak, at all, to journalists or foreigners. Like a free man, he did both, openly and repeatedly.

But whereas Libby had passed classified information, and Vanunu had served his earlier sentence for doing the same, in this instance Vanunu was not charged with revealing any secrets. The transcripts or published accounts of his conversations being available, it was open knowledge that what he had mainly talked about was the truth of his personal convictions about nuclear weapons: that they should universally be abolished, Israel's among them.

Perjury, with the intent and effect of obstructing justice (successfully, as it happens, in Libby's case) is an ancient, established crime under virtually any system of justice. Vanunu's act of speaking his mind freely is not, under existing international human rights law. Nor is it a domestic crime in other democratic societies. These were not conditions of parole, as frequently misstated. Vanunu was not paroled from prison for his earlier conviction, but served his full sentence of eighteen years, eleven and a half of them in solitary confinement. Therefore, under most systems of criminal justice, he should have been subject to no further restrictions or requirements.

What, then, was the legal status of the restrictions which he has now been sentenced for violating? The answer is that the Israeli law under which his speech and movement are restricted is an unmodified relic of the British Mandate period in Palestine, i.e. a colonial regulation. Nothing like it exists in any other democracy in the world. It is as if the young United States had reenacted the British oppressions and restrictions that lead to the revolution, and that were condemned in the Declaration of Independence and banned in the Bill of Rights. Vanunu mordantly reflected on hearing his new sentence that perhaps his appeal should be to the Queen of England.

There are other differences between the two cases. The clear purpose of Lewis Libby's conversations with journalists was to discredit someone, Joseph Wilson, who had publicly told truth that contradicted Administration lies. Some of the classified information he had revealed-at the direction of his boss, Vice President Richard Cheney-was itself deliberately misleading about the basis on which the country had been led to war in Iraq. The passage he revealed from a secret National Intelligence Estimate was selectively lifted from a context that included warnings that the estimate in it was uncertain and controversial within the intelligence community. It was, in fact, mistaken. And by the time Libby was authorized to release it by the Vice President (whose authority to do so is very much in question), both Cheney and Libby knew this, that the estimate being shown was false.

The other piece of classified information Libby revealed was the name and job of Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, a clandestine CIA operative whose work was to discover patterns of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Full disclosure: I do not consider all classified information sacrosanct or properly kept secret, and I myself was put on trial for deliberately copying and revealing classified information, the Pentagon Papers. But I would not have revealed Valerie Plame's name or clandestine status. She was doing work that unquestionably served the national security interests of the United States and for her to do it obviously required and deserved secrecy.

Moreover, that particular secret (unlike anything in the Pentagon Papers) was protected by a law passed by Congress, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, criminalizing knowing revelation of the identities of covert operatives. (Whether Libby knew her clandestine status remains unknown and unproveable, thanks to his lapses of memory, or perhaps, lies). I don't object to that narrowly-defined act, whereas I would oppose strongly a general Official Secrets Act such as Britain's, criminalizing any and all revelations of classified information, which has so far been precluded from passage by our First Amendment.
There is no question that the information Vanunu revealed to the press in 1986-primarily, that Israel, which has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty nor opened its nuclear operations to any international inspection, had been for some time a nuclear weapons state, with an arsenal larger than that of Britain and perhaps larger than France-was regarded as secret in Israel and his revelation as illegal. On the other hand, no other nuclear weapons state had kept this status secret from its own people and the world: again, with the exception of South Africa, which revealed its earlier secret arsenal at the same time as disbanding it along with apartheid. Moreover, by 1986 this program (aside from the scale Vanunu revealed, which was a surprise even to CIA) was a secret almost exclusively from those Israelis and others (including, officially, the American Government) that chose to believe Israel's ambiguous and deliberately deceptive denials.

In any case, it was information that Vanunu's fellow citizens deserved urgently to have had long before, in time to reach an informed, democratic judgment and influence on their country's policy. In my opinion, Mordechai Vanunu did what he should have with the information he acquired. I hope that I would have done the same in his position. His readiness to accept the personal risk that his truth-telling actually entailed--that he would suffer a long prison sentence (and the longest time in solitary confinement known to Amnesty International, which defined it as a human rights violation)--is deserving of worldwide admiration, and, I hope, emulation. His continued restriction and persecution after serving his sentence, his new return to prison for six months on a pretence of preserving twenty-five-year-old secrets that he has yet to reveal (and which the restrictions do not protect), are illegal and outrageous.

As for Libby, I have no strong opinion on whether his sentence of thirty months in prison was, as President Bush judged in commuting it, excessive. As Bush undoubtedly knows in more detail than we do, Libby was only carrying out, routinely, the wishes and orders-manifestly illegal as they were-of his bosses. If this were confirmed by the Congressional investigation that should be forthcoming on the deceptions and violations of law and the Constitution that led us into war (and may do so again in Iran), it should lead to impeachment and then to criminal prosecution of Richard Cheney and/or George Bush. But a damper on such an effort is the now-certainty that conviction of either Cheney or his superior would be nullified by presidential pardon. It may not be true, as Richard Nixon declared, that "If the president does it, it is not illegal." But whatever "it" is, if done or ordered by the president or vice president, it appears to be unpunishable. As in Israel, rules suited to an older imperial system, not a republic, are in force.

Daniel Ellsberg made history when as a top Pentagon official, he released the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War, which exposed government lies going back 20 years. His act of resistance helped galvanize opposition to the war and triggered the events leading to Watergate and the downfall of Richard Nixon.

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