Getting revenge, Washington-style

Gene Lyons

Posted on Wednesday, July 6, 2005

People who write about politics are often accused of being too cynical. Truth is, it’s hard to be cynical enough to keep up with the professionals. Take that contemptible speech White House apparatchik Karl Rove gave recently accusing liberals of wanting to offer "therapy and understanding" to the 9/11 terrorists. This in the face of 420-1 and 98-0 votes in Congress to make war on Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies in Afghanistan. Back then, I figured that was the Bush administration’s Iraq endgame: stalling for time against growing public disenchantment, intimidating critics, and shifting blame from its own falsehoods and screw-ups to anybody who had the temerity to point them out. It’s the "stab in the back" smear beloved of demagogues everywhere. They use it because when people are frightened, it works. Indeed, my column saying so generated e-mails from patriots saying I should be hanged for treason. Democracy is always a work in progress. Many would opt for tribalism if they could. Propagandists like Rove count on it.

Now it seems I was too unimaginative. With the indications that Rove was Time magazine’s anonymous source in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, it appears he may have had a second motive: saving his own posterior from serious criminal charges.

It may not come to that. But this is a perilous moment for the Bush White House. Its significance shouldn’t get lost in the Washington press corps’ narcissistic hand-wringing over two reporters’ facing jail time for defying court orders to testify.

This case has nothing to do with a vigilant press corps’ ability to protect "whistle-blowers" against retribution from the powerful. Rather, it’s about Machiavellian White House operatives using the cloak of anonymity to take revenge against a whistle-blower’s family, exposing an undercover CIA agent’s identity to intimidate others from speaking out.

For the uninitiated, a summary: During his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush warned against Iraq’s imaginary nuclear weapons: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.... Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide."

Problem was, the claim was based upon bogus documents that surfaced in Italy soon after 9/11. The CIA had previously warned the White House not to cite the phony claim, but little gremlins kept sticking it back into Bush’s speech.

In 2002, the CIA had dispatched a former U.S. ambassador with a top-secret security clearance to Niger to investigate at Vice President Dick Cheney’s insistence. He’d reported that the allegations in the documents couldn’t possibly be true; experts subsequently proved them crude forgeries.

Two months after Bush’s "mission accomplished" aircraft carrier stunt, Joe Wilson, former ambassador to Gabon, went public. He wrote a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed basically saying that the White House knew the African uranium scare was false when Bush made it, a classic instance of what the Downing Street memos called "intelligence and facts... being fixed around the policy."

The White House was forced to admit the "error."

One week later, right-wing columnist Robert Novak sneered that two "senior administration officials" told him Wilson had gotten the job only because his wife was a CIA agent. How that was supposed to affect his truthfulness was unclear, but indeed she was. Under her maiden name, Valerie Plame, Mrs. Wilson worked for a CIA front company called Brewster Jennings & Associates investigating illegal traffic in weapons of mass destruction.

When Plame’s cover was blown, so was the whole operation. Lives were endangered. Retired CIA agents say her career was effectively destroyed.

Instead of folding, the Wilsons fought back. There are federal laws against purposely revealing a covert operative’s identity. The White House was compelled to ask for an independent prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, to investigate a mystery Bush pronounced himself determined to solve.

Fitzgerald provided evidence to a series of federal courts that he needed the testimony of two reporters, Matt Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of The New York Times, to complete his probe of a serious crime. Other reporters have previously testified.

Out of appeals, Time folded. According to Newsweek, Rove’s lawyer now admits that his client "spoke to Cooper [about Valerie Plame] three or four days before Novak’s column appeared," but "never knowingly disclosed classified information." (My italics.)

Intent, see, is an element of the criminal statute. You don’t need a law degree to recognize a careful non-denial denial, ranking up there with Bill Clinton’s parsing the meaning of "is." But these aren’t pathetic sex secrets. This is a White House operative using the media to cover up presidential falsehoods that led the nation to war. Maybe Rove committed a crime, maybe not. But ask yourself this: What benign purpose could he have for discussing Plame with reporters on the very day Wilson’s whistle-blowing article appeared?