Some pundits point to
Karl Rove, others say Dick Cheney, still others believe Mr. X is
someone else.
By Frederick
Sweet
The mainstream press finally caught up with
Intervention Magazine in accusing President George W. Bush's
Administration of violating national security laws. By exposing the
identity of Valerie Plame, the weapons of mass destruction
specialist who had been an undercover operative for the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Administration endangered not only a
government employee but also our national security. The
Administration
must be held accountable and the individual or
individuals who leaked the Agent's identity must be
punished!
The mainstream press has recently focused on Carl
Rove as the major suspect in leaking to columnist Robert Novak that
Plame was a CIA operative. Rove is the Bush administration's chief
ideologue. Yet, Rove rarely deals with the CIA and so he could not
have been more than a cut out for someone closer to the Agency. What
Rove may become, however, is a patsy to take the fall for a much
higher and indispensable official.
In my opinion, Dick
Cheney is most likely the Mr. X who masterminded the leak to the
media.
Cheney Prime Suspect? Only recently
has it become generally known that Cheney made dozens of trips to
the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Cheney
insisted on the CIA
rendering a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat
posed by Saddam Hussein.
To make sure that his influence was
regularly felt in Langley, when Cheney could not go, he sent his
chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to haunt the CIA. This
aggressive involvement in intelligence data processing was rare for
a Vice President, even in recent times. Cheney's pressure was
intended to get CIA officials to come up with the conclusion that
Saddam Hussein was Enemy Number One in connection with the 9/11
terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. This was considered
important to justify invading Iraq.
Cheney would have been
the best informed in Bush's administration about exactly who at the
CIA was establishing the yellow uranium Niger-Iraq connection and,
in turn, for making the plausible argument that Saddam was poised to
use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against the United States.
This argument was part of Bush's State of the Union address to the
nation last January.
But it had been Cheney who was right on
top of Wilson's CIA-sponsored secret mission to Niger and,
therefore, the one most stung by Wilson's July 2003 letter to the
New York Times discrediting the Niger-Iraq-WMD connections. That's
why Cheney would have been the one to sting Wilson back as a warning
to others who could undermine the rest of the Cheney-Bush foreign
policies.
Administration Connects Saddam to
9/11An early aim of the Cheney-Bush foreign policy was
to expand the U.S. presence in the Middle East. All they needed was
a pretext for beginning the process. The 9/11 terrorist attack on
America conveniently provided the pretext.
The Washington
Post revealed on June 5, 2003 that immediately after the 9/11
terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told senior officials at the
Pentagon that he believed Iraq had been responsible. "I was
scratching my head because everyone else thought of al Qaeda," said
a former senior defense official who had attended one such meeting.
Over the following year, "we got taskers to review the link between
al Qaeda and Iraq. There was a very aggressive search." Thus a major
focus for Wolfowitz and others in the Pentagon was finding
intelligence to prove a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama
bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.
In the winter of
2001-02, officials who worked with Wolfowitz sent the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) a message: Get hold of Laurie Mylroie's
book, Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and
Saddam Hussein's War Against America, which claimed Hussein was
behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. See if you can
prove it, one former defense official said.
The DIA's Middle
East analysts were familiar with Mylroie's book, but they and others
in the U.S. intelligence community were convinced that radical
Islamic fundamentalists, not Iraq, were involved. "The message was,
why can't we prove this is right?" said the official.
Retired
Vice Adm. Thomas R. Wilson, then director of DIA, ordered his Middle
East analysts to go through Mylroie's book again. They were directed
to check all the allegations and see if they could be substantiated,
said one current and one former intelligence official familiar with
the request. But, try as they might, Wilson's staff was unable to
make the link.
Then the Vice President took the lead within
the administration in August 2002. Cheney advocated military action
against Iraq by claiming it had weapons of mass destruction.
Frequent visits to CIA headquarters by the Vice President and his
chief of staff Libby, "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a
certain output was desired from here," one senior agency official
said.
Congress Asks QuestionsIn 2003, former
and current intelligence officials said they felt a continual
drumbeat, not only from Cheney and Libby, but also from Wolfowitz,
Feith, and less so from CIA Director George J. Tenet. They had to
find information or write reports in a way that would help the
administration make its case that going into Iraq was
urgent.
"They were the browbeaters," said a former defense
intelligence official who attended some of the meetings in which
Wolfowitz and others pressed for a different approach to the
assessments they were receiving. "In interagency meetings," he said,
"Wolfowitz treated the analysts' work with contempt."
By
2003, as a result of the failure to uncover any weapons of mass
destruction two months after the collapse of the Iraqi government,
concern over the administration's prewar claims about Iraq had been
growing in Congress and among intelligence officials.
Rep.
Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) held a Congressional briefing in a hearing
room packed with reporters and cameras, featuring VIPS (Veterans
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) spokesman Ray McGovern, and
Andrew Wilkie, a senior intelligence analyst for Australia's Office
of National Assessments, who had resigned on March 11, 2003, to
protest the way intelligence was misused to justify Australia's
support for war on Iraq.
Kucinich asked McGovern, who had
been a CIA briefing officer for Vice President George H.W. Bush
during the 1980s, a series of questions such as: Is it possible that
Vice President Cheney was never told about the Wilson mission to
Niger? "That's an easy one," McGovern answered. "It is not
possible." McGovern then pointed out that Cheney had "led the
charge" for war last summer, using disinformation and the "mushroom
cloud scare" to frighten Congress into giving the President the
authority to go to war against Iraq.
Kucinich also asked
McGovern if it were possible that someone like former Ambassador
Wilson could be sent to Niger at the initiative of the Vice
President, and then the Vice President would not have been told the
result? McGovern said that this would go through National Security
Council (NSC) channels, adding: "When a Vice President has a
question, as certain as night follows day, he gets an
answer."
Office for Special Plans: The Shadow
GovernmentAccording to former Bush officials (all
defense and intelligence sources) senior members of the
administration created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed
mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its
military counterpart, the Defense Intelligence Agency. The agency,
called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defense
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information. OSP
operated under the patronage of hard-line conservatives in the top
rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and Cheney at the White
House.
The ideologically driven network functioned like a
shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond
congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in
a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a
justification for war.
CIA Director George Tenet has
officially taken responsibility for the President's unsubstantiated
claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy
uranium in Africa. But it had been Wilson's impossible mission to
confirm this with a Niger-Iraq connection. Tenet also made it clear
that his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the
administration had already decided on.
Then USA Today
reported that Tenet is being pushed toward "walking the plank,"
suggesting that vice president Cheney's office is in the lead among
those pushing for Tenet's ouster, citing a number of reasons why
Cheney's office is angry at the CIA Director.
Cheney As
Media TargetEleanor Clift wrote in a Newsweek Online
column: "CIA director George Tenet sent [Joseph] Wilson to Niger
after Vice President Cheney asked for an investigation. Wilson asks
why Cheney's office would demand this inquiry and not want to know
the result. If Bush really was misled, wouldn't he want to know who
embarrassed him? Who made him a liar? In a White House as obsessed
with loyalty as this one, the fact that no heads rolled strongly
indicates this could go all the way to Cheney, if not to Bush
himself. Who knows how much Cheney tells the boss. Bush is not a
detail guy. He may not have wanted to know."
The Washington
Post reported in a front-page story: "Administration sources said
White House officials, particularly those in the office of Vice
President Cheney, insisted on including Hussein's quest for a
nuclear weapon as a prominent part of their public case for war in
Iraq. Cheney had made the potential threat of Hussein having a
nuclear weapon a central theme of his August 2002 speeches that
began the public buildup toward war with Baghdad."
Maureen
Dowd, in her Sunday New York Times column, noted that the line about
the Niger story only got into the State of the Union speech over the
CIA's objections, because "a higher power wanted it in. And that had
to be Dick Cheney's office," Dowd concluded, noting that former
Ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger to investigate the Iraq
claim by the CIA, in response to questions raised by Cheney's
office.
The London Guardian wrote: "Fingers were also pointed
at the vice-president, Dick Cheney, who was allegedly obsessed with
proving his repeated claims last August that Saddam was actively
pursuing a nuclear program.... According to his chief of staff,
Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney had taken an interest in an Italian
intelligence report in late 2001 about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium
in Niger."
Time magazine noted that when the Italian report
on Niger yellow cake got to Washington, it "caught the eye of
someone important: Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney's interest
hardly came as a surprise," Time said, explaining that "he has long
been known to harbor some of the most hard-line views of Saddam's
nuclear ambitions."
On July 15, 2003 Rep. Henry Waxman
(D-Calif.) sent a letter to the leadership of the House Intelligence
Committee, highlighting reports that the forged Niger documents had
been first given to Vice President Cheney's office in early 2002.
Waxman demanded that a number of agencies and offices, including
Cheney's, be thoroughly investigated for abuse of
intelligence.
A group of retired intelligence officers known
as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) called upon
President Bush to ask for Cheney's immediate resignation. VIPS told
the president that Cheney's role has been so transparent that
further attempts to cover it up "will only erode further your own
credibility."
Then New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff
featured the VIPS' statement, saying that it reflects the view of
many in the intelligence community "that the central culprit is Vice
President Dick Cheney."
Douglas Holt, writing for Knight
Ridder News Service, reported that Greg Thielmann, who retired in
September as director of strategic, proliferation and military
affairs in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and
Research, said he saw no curiosity from Cheney about the State
Department's intelligence shop, known as INR. That agency was far
more skeptical than the CIA about claims that Iraq possessed
threatening weaponry.
"One would think if Cheney was on some
sort of noble pursuit of the truth and really wanted to get into
details, he would have noticed that INR had very loud and lengthy
dissents on some critical pieces of Iraq intelligence," Thielmann
said. "You'd think he might want to hear from us," he added. "It
never happened, of course, because Cheney wasn't engaged in an
academic search for truth."
CIA Director George Tenet and
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice have taken responsibility
and expressed regret for allowing president Bush to make an
erroneous claim in his State of the Union address. In contrast, Vice
President Cheney adopted an unapologetic defense of the war in Iraq.
Cheney The LeakerGiven Bush-Cheney's
obsession with secrecy, the CIA-haunting Cheney is expected to be
most proactive and also have sufficient authority to "taking out" a
whistle blower like Wilson. Wilson had published his New York Times
letter in exposing Bush's reason for invading Iraq as bogus in July,
2003. An example had to be made of Wilson to discourage other truth
tellers. Only Bush or Cheney could make it happen.
Within the
Bush administration, CIA Director Tenet aside, those with the most
direct links to classified information at the Agency are Cheney and
his chief of staff Libby. But it is highly unlikely that Cheney
himself would have tipped Novak off that Wilson's wife, Valerie
Plame had been a WMD undercover operative. It is most likely that
Libby would be Cheney's conduit for getting that leak moving along
to Novak. Rove may even have even been a "relay runner" in moving
the leak process, but certainly he could not have been the prime
mover. In the tightly controlled Bush White House, only Cheney (or
Bush) could have started the ball rolling.
If the above
hypothesis is correct, then only a special prosecutor can possibly
expose Cheney as the mastermind of the national security leak. The
vice president is insulated by several layers of personnel who can
be sacrificed long before the searchlight of truth will shine on
Cheney. For national security and the democratic process to have an
even chance under the Bush Administration, only a competent and
impartial independent investigation of this scandalous crime can
allow Americans to sleep safely in their
beds.
