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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The Next Attorney General

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales' resignation is effective Monday, Sept. 17.

One person that the next Attorney General should not be is somebody like the soon-to-be acting Attorney General, Paul Clement.

Clement's problem, not one of intellect, is his partisan zeal. And that is precisely why the right-wingers want to see him as a federal judge, even a Supreme Court nominee. [Too late for that now.]

But the corrupt Justice Department needs someone of unsurpassed integrity and independence. Such people exist only in the imaginations of newspaper editorial writers, so we will have settle for someone like Patrick Fitzgerald, Robert Mueller and James Comey.

But the need for an attorney general approximating political independence cannot be underestimated. As the Times writes:

The Justice Department is a disaster zone. It should be the embodiment of America's commitment to the rule of law, but it has been contaminated by partisan politics. The nation's top lawyers may have broken the law, and even may have sent innocent people to jail, to advance the interests of the Republican Party.

The next attorney general will have an enormous amount of damage to undo. There is considerable evidence that United States attorneys have been coerced into using their offices to help Republicans win elections. The orders may have come directly from the White House. Top officials of the Justice Department have admitted that they evaluated lawyers for nonpolitical jobs based on their politics. And Congress is investigating whether Georgia Thompson, a Wisconsin civil servant, and Don Siegelman, the former governor of Alabama, were sent to jail to help Republicans win governorships in those states.

Making it a federal crime to oppose the Republican Party as the DoJ has selectively done ought to be a crime (it is) screaming from every newspaper and talk radio show in America (it is not).

The fact is that we may be stuck with a right-winger as the next attorney general anyway.

Clement can in theory serve out the remainder of Bush’s term, though I doubt he would wish to do so.

If Bush nominates a partisan like Theodore B. Olson, he will not be confirmed.

Bush could then make a recess appointment of a right-winger who will serve out the bulk of Bush’s term without Senate confirmation.

The Senate will make noise about bringing all appointments to a halt.

But Bush will not care about that, and does not exactly care about good relations with Congress :) .

The one person Bush will not nominate is an intellectually honest, rule-of-law individual who would actually investigate the administration’s many misdeeds, and that is precisely who the country needs.
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Libby Apologists Are A Gift to Anthropologists Everywhere

Published on The Smirking Chimp (http://www.smirkingchimp.com)

Libby Apologists Are A Gift to Anthropologists Everywhere

By RJ Eskow

If I were studying sociology or anthropology I'd drop everything right now and run to Washington, DC. There's a great piece to be written about what Scooter Libby's defenders reveal about that city's power elite.

(Think "Mean Girls" meets "All the President's Men.") What an opportunity: The response to perceived attack on one of the tribe is revealing a hidden culture to the world.

Social scientists will tell you that most communities are divided into at least two groups, insiders and interlopers. Washington is no exception. "He came in and trashed the place," David Broder famously wrote of Bill Clinton, "and it wasn't his place." It's Scooter Libby's place, though. He's part of the capital's power elite, a culture with its own social hierarchy, folkways, and shared beliefs.

Anthropologists are fond of drawing "kinship charts" that document relationships and hierarchies within a tribe or community. A Washington "kinship chart" would show that the consanguineal loyalties of biological family have been replaced by webs of social intimacy and shared perceptions.

At the top of the DC chart are the designated leaders, the chieftains. The best way to get there is to have occupied a place in the hierarchy for a long time, after working your way up as apprentice to an earlier chief. A history of senior positions in past administrations fits the bill, hence the prominence of figures like Cheney and Rumsfeld. That's why in some ways Cheney holds more totemic power in Washington than does Bush himself.

On the next line down come those who draw their power from the top-line leaders. That's where Scooter comes in, as a Cheney acolyte. That's where Mary Matalin shows up, too, as a long-time operative for Republican administrations.

The law school professors who authored a brief challenging the special prosecutor [1] in the Libby case appear on this line, too. They represent a long line of interest groups, think tanks, and academic institutions who benefit from the largesse of the top-line hierarchy through grants of power, funding, and/or support for cherished causes.

Newspaper publishers hold top-line status based on the institutions they control, while the writers and commentators who work for them appear several layers down in the chart.

On a practical level, the ability of these writers to survive professionally depends on the favors bestowed on them from their social superiors in government and the media. On a personal level, they identify emotionally with the tribe and react violently when any of its leaders are under attack.
This group's folkways are reinforced every day. Their kids go to the same schools. They go to the same restaurants and clubs. Their intimacy's been ritually celebrated at a thousand cocktail parties, with wine and hors d'oeuvres as the unconsecrated host. And judging from what we've heard lately, it seems that excoriating unruly outsiders (whether they're bloggers, Bill Clinton, or uncooperative voters) has replaced the ritual eating of an enemy's heart.

Maybe that's why writers like Richard Cohen can so casually commit what seems to be journalistic malpractice when writing about the Libby case.

For example, no matter how many times Patrick Fitzgerald repeats his belief that an underlying crime was committed in the Libby case, Cohen and his fellows will keep saying that Fitzgerald's asserted no such thing.

Why such misdirection, which appears to violate the Society of Professional Journalists' written code of ethics [2]? And now now Cohen seems to be asserting [3]that a Republican prosecutor and Republican judge are conducting a leftist show trial in retaliation for the war in Iraq.

That sort of twisted logic isn't unusual among Libby defenders. Why do people who are often smart thinkers and good writers allow themselves to bend the rules of logic and ethics in defense of someone like Libby?

Because people who do deceitful things often believe that they're obeying a higher ethical law. Often they're not even conscious of doing anything wrong. So when the Richard Cohens of the world repeatedly misstate the facts, one can only conclude that their belief in Libby's "decency" and the "unfairness" of the prosecution allows them to ignore both good journalism and the national good.

Tribe members consider Libby a decent public servant tricked by inquisitors into perjuring himself. Most other Americans recognize him for what he really is: a convict who convinced a Republican prosecutor and judge - and an entire jury - of his criminality, beyond a reasonable doubt.

That's the problem. Sometimes the pull of cultural beliefs is so strong that people can't even see facts that threaten their shared reality. I would guess that no journalist or pundit working in DC today - not Cohen, not Joe Klein, not David Broder - believes they are doing anything other than upholding their professional principles and serving the nation.

That's why they can't react to challenges without indignation, rage, or distortion: Those challenges undermine their shared reality, so the challengers must be personally attacked instead. Their identity becomes the topic. The result? Outsiders such as bloggers become the enemy tribe. The fact that these outsiders don't obey the group's social conventions only amplifies the outrage.

Mary Matalin's letter on behalf of Libby (co-signed by her husband James Carville) is an especially useful vein for reserchers in search of DC folklore.

"His wife and my husband share similar (presumably centrist Democratic) political views," Matalin writes. This speaks to "bipartisanship," a so-far mythical political movement extolled by Broder and others. Bipartisanship remains attractive to members of the insider group because it places greater importance on tribal standing than on heartfelt political values.

"Our service put great strains on our respective families," writes Ms. Matalin. This echoes a common theme in many of Mr. Libby's letters of support, which emphasizes the bonding ritual of long hours spent working in the corridors of power.

But it is in speaking of children that Ms. Matalin best articulates the folkways and loyalties of the DC tribe. She writes movingly of Libby's attempts to entertain children isolated in a "secure undisclosed location" one Halloween, and asks the judge to consider "what further justice would be served by additional devastation to them and the many other children who love Scooter."

This shouldn't need to be said, but let's be clear: Nobody wants Libby's children or their friends to suffer. It's tough to be the child of a felon. What I find striking about the Matalin letter is not its tender concern for children, which is admirable, but the underlying amorality shown by its inability to see the suffering of Valerie Plame Wilson's children or the many others hurt by Libby's actions. Those children are simply less real to her. Out of sight, out of mind. That's Ms. Matalin's problem, and it's Cohen's too.

Libby's lawyer reportedly tried to block the release of the letters written on his behalf by Matalin and such top-line chieftains as Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld. His argument was that their publication would subject their authors to scorn and ridicule, especially by that hostile tribe known as "bloggers." Maybe, but I'm more concerned about making sure they're available to be catalogued, studied, and understood.

The underground folkways and practices of this particular tribe may not be this visible again for years. Graduate students, take note. This is your chance to study a culture that's rarely observed in the field. The more it's exposed to the light of day, the more it will be robbed of its power.
Any takers? It would be a good way to write your thesis - and help your country at the same time.
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