Plame affair grows more complicated
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, October 12, 2005
On FOX News this past Sunday, William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, cautioned the Republican faithful of hard times to come. Citing criminal defense lawyers “friendly to the administration,” he predicted indictments of “senior administration officials” in the Valerie Plame CIA leaks investigation . “I think it’s going to be bad for the Bush administration ,” he added . The closest thing in Washington to an intellectually honest neo-con, Kristol also lamented “the criminalization of politics.” Well, cry me a river. Where were Kristol and his magazine during the late Clinton scandals? Beating the drum for Kenneth Starr and his leak-o-matic team of Whitewater fantasists and bed sheet sniffers, naturally. Fake lawsuits, phony investigations, trumped-up accusations, the lot . All justified by Bill Clinton’s extravagant folly and desperate little lies, they insisted .
But Democrats shouldn’t gloat. Far from being pay-back, this is serious business involving grave, life-and-death issues. Moreover, it could be worse than bad for GOP true believers. The indictments of several name-brand White House aides, should they materialize, would mark the effective end of the Bush administration’s ability to govern in anything but the narrowest formal sense.
What’s more, if ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos’ unnamed source is correct, and President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were directly involved in conversations about how to neutralize Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, after he went public about false claims regarding Iraq’s nonexistent nukes, there’s no telling where things could end .
Granted, that’s a lot of maybes. All necessary, it’s worth pointing out, because, unlike Kenneth Starr, career federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald runs a tight ship. Everything we know about the Plame investigation comes from public courtroom pleadings, journalists forced to testify about their conversations with White House aides and the carefully spun revelations of defense attorneys.
Yet to paraphrase the first President Bush, the doodoo appears to be getting much deeper.
As in a proper investigation, persons making multiple appearances before Fitzgerald’s Washington grand jury, those such as Karl Rove, Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby and self-dramatizing New York Times reporter Judith Miller, have no clear idea how other witnesses have testified or what documents prosecutors have seen; hence, they’re well-advised to come clean .
Miller’s suddenly “finding” her notes from previously unreported meetings with Libby in June 2003—his carefully worded letter to her mentioned only July conversations—is a case in point . Their very existence casts doubt on the White House’s first cover story: that aides were only warning reporters off the supposedly unreliable Joe Wilson. His New York Times op-ed piece implying that the Bush administration cooked the intelligence books to justify war with Iraq didn’t appear until July 6.
Wilson wrote in his book that the so called “White House Iraq group,” created specifically to justify war, set out to damage his reputation months earlier, as soon his apostasy on Saddam Hussein’s nukes became known to them. Was revealing his wife’s connection with the CIA a deliberate part of the plan?
Encouraging hurtful coverage by Miller, author of several since-discredited “exclusives” on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and a virtual de facto member of the White House team, may have seemed like a clever plan.
Another potential complicating factor is that many key White House witnesses, including the current president and his vice president, made their first statements to FBI agents back when the Plame investigation was in the presumptively more reliable hands of Attorney General John Ashcroft. Now they have to live with them. The appointment of a non-partisan pro like Fitzgerald must have caused sweaty palms all around.
Suspicious minds wonder if that’s why Karl Rove suddenly recalled that he’d forgotten his conversations about Wilson and Plame with a half-dozen reporters back when Bush first asked him about it. But who is his recovered memory protecting? Himself or the president? Inquiring minds want to know .
But that’s enough inside baseball. It’s easy to get lost in the minutiae of an emerging Washington scandal and forget what it’s all about. At bottom, the Plame investigation is about how the U . S . deluded itself into invading Iraq on false pretenses, about the substitution of radical-right ideology for professional intelligence gathering and political revenge taken against dissenters from the party line. It’s the CIA vs. the Bush White House. In a healthy democracy, citizens would demand to know who forged the documents that caused the CIA to send Wilson to Africa to begin with, but the GOP-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee refused to probe the matter, and the Washington press has been too busy playing footsie with White House insiders to bother. No matter how it turns out, Fitzgerald’s investigation seems unlikely to reach the ultimate questions. But it could remind Americans that the answers couldn’t be more important to the nation’s future.
•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award .
Your free view of Gene Lyons' column is supported by today's sponsor: ------------------------------------------------------------------- Technology Made Easy so you can Enjoy Your Technology! Help with PCs, iPods, network & much more. Industry Leader. http://click.topica.com/caad3QVa2iUypa4mo0Vf/LightFrog
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, October 12, 2005
On FOX News this past Sunday, William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, cautioned the Republican faithful of hard times to come. Citing criminal defense lawyers “friendly to the administration,” he predicted indictments of “senior administration officials” in the Valerie Plame CIA leaks investigation . “I think it’s going to be bad for the Bush administration ,” he added . The closest thing in Washington to an intellectually honest neo-con, Kristol also lamented “the criminalization of politics.” Well, cry me a river. Where were Kristol and his magazine during the late Clinton scandals? Beating the drum for Kenneth Starr and his leak-o-matic team of Whitewater fantasists and bed sheet sniffers, naturally. Fake lawsuits, phony investigations, trumped-up accusations, the lot . All justified by Bill Clinton’s extravagant folly and desperate little lies, they insisted .
But Democrats shouldn’t gloat. Far from being pay-back, this is serious business involving grave, life-and-death issues. Moreover, it could be worse than bad for GOP true believers. The indictments of several name-brand White House aides, should they materialize, would mark the effective end of the Bush administration’s ability to govern in anything but the narrowest formal sense.
What’s more, if ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos’ unnamed source is correct, and President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were directly involved in conversations about how to neutralize Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, after he went public about false claims regarding Iraq’s nonexistent nukes, there’s no telling where things could end .
Granted, that’s a lot of maybes. All necessary, it’s worth pointing out, because, unlike Kenneth Starr, career federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald runs a tight ship. Everything we know about the Plame investigation comes from public courtroom pleadings, journalists forced to testify about their conversations with White House aides and the carefully spun revelations of defense attorneys.
Yet to paraphrase the first President Bush, the doodoo appears to be getting much deeper.
As in a proper investigation, persons making multiple appearances before Fitzgerald’s Washington grand jury, those such as Karl Rove, Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby and self-dramatizing New York Times reporter Judith Miller, have no clear idea how other witnesses have testified or what documents prosecutors have seen; hence, they’re well-advised to come clean .
Miller’s suddenly “finding” her notes from previously unreported meetings with Libby in June 2003—his carefully worded letter to her mentioned only July conversations—is a case in point . Their very existence casts doubt on the White House’s first cover story: that aides were only warning reporters off the supposedly unreliable Joe Wilson. His New York Times op-ed piece implying that the Bush administration cooked the intelligence books to justify war with Iraq didn’t appear until July 6.
Wilson wrote in his book that the so called “White House Iraq group,” created specifically to justify war, set out to damage his reputation months earlier, as soon his apostasy on Saddam Hussein’s nukes became known to them. Was revealing his wife’s connection with the CIA a deliberate part of the plan?
Encouraging hurtful coverage by Miller, author of several since-discredited “exclusives” on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and a virtual de facto member of the White House team, may have seemed like a clever plan.
Another potential complicating factor is that many key White House witnesses, including the current president and his vice president, made their first statements to FBI agents back when the Plame investigation was in the presumptively more reliable hands of Attorney General John Ashcroft. Now they have to live with them. The appointment of a non-partisan pro like Fitzgerald must have caused sweaty palms all around.
Suspicious minds wonder if that’s why Karl Rove suddenly recalled that he’d forgotten his conversations about Wilson and Plame with a half-dozen reporters back when Bush first asked him about it. But who is his recovered memory protecting? Himself or the president? Inquiring minds want to know .
But that’s enough inside baseball. It’s easy to get lost in the minutiae of an emerging Washington scandal and forget what it’s all about. At bottom, the Plame investigation is about how the U . S . deluded itself into invading Iraq on false pretenses, about the substitution of radical-right ideology for professional intelligence gathering and political revenge taken against dissenters from the party line. It’s the CIA vs. the Bush White House. In a healthy democracy, citizens would demand to know who forged the documents that caused the CIA to send Wilson to Africa to begin with, but the GOP-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee refused to probe the matter, and the Washington press has been too busy playing footsie with White House insiders to bother. No matter how it turns out, Fitzgerald’s investigation seems unlikely to reach the ultimate questions. But it could remind Americans that the answers couldn’t be more important to the nation’s future.
•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award .
Your free view of Gene Lyons' column is supported by today's sponsor: ------------------------------------------------------------------- Technology Made Easy so you can Enjoy Your Technology! Help with PCs, iPods, network & much more. Industry Leader. http://click.topica.com/caad3QVa2iUypa4mo0Vf/LightFrog
posted by A. J. Franklin @ 13:25
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