Date: July 17, 2005 5:02:21 AM PDT
Subject: [Spy News] The White House's vicious attack
53868.html
The White House's vicious attack
By Robert Scheer
Sunday, July 17, 2005
If you can't shoot the messenger, take aim at his wife.
That clearly was the intent of White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove
in leaking to a reporter that former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's wife,
Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent. To try to conceal the fact that the
president had lied to the American public about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction program, Rove attempted to destroy the credibility of two
national security veterans and send an intimidating message to any other
government officials preparing to publicly tell the truth.
Rove's lawyer now says that Rove didn't break the law against naming covert
agents because he didn't know Plame's name and therefore couldn't have
revealed it. Perhaps he can use such a technicality in court, but in the
meantime he should resign immediately -- or be fired by the president -- for
leaking classified information, trying to smear Wilson and possibly
endangering Plame's life.
"The White House promised if anyone was involved in the Valerie Plame
affair, they would no longer be in this administration," said Senate
Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "I trust they will follow through on this
pledge."
The background on this story is crucial. Ambassador Wilson had been honored
as a patriot by President George H.W. Bush for standing up to Saddam Hussein
in a face-to-face confrontation in Baghdad on the eve of the Persian Gulf
War. But in 2003, Wilson committed an unpardonable crime in the eyes of the
second Bush White House. He exposed its lies about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction programs.
In 16 now infamous words in Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, the
president -- desperate to gain support for an invasion he was dead set on
initiating -- tried to scare Americans into believing Iraq was close to
making nuclear weapons. "The British government," he told the nation, "has
learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa." But the key documents that the claim was based on
already had been proved to be fakes.
In fact, it was a CIA-organized mission by Wilson to the African country of
Niger (where he had served as ambassador) that determined the reports were
false. Wilson was therefore shocked to hear the uranium claims in the
president's speech. When he exposed the chicanery in a New York Times
commentary, Wilson became a prime target for a White House smear job.
According to e-mails that Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper sent to his
editor (which were revealed by Newsweek last weekend), Rove told Cooper that
Wilson's devastating expose should be discounted because the Niger
fact-finding trip had been authorized by Wilson's wife, who worked at the
CIA.
This was three days before Robert Novak, citing two White House sources,
outed Plame as a CIA agent in his column and put forward the same notion.
It's ironic that the expertise of this couple should be turned against them
by a White House that has demonstrated nothing but incompetence in dealing
with the WMD issue. But clearly truth and competence are virtues easily shed
by the Bush administration in the pursuit of political advantage, even when
this partisan game jeopardizes national security.
This is the most important issue raised by the Plame scandal. It has been
unfortunately obscured by the secondary debate in the case: whether
reporters should ever reveal their sources. Yet what the emerging Rove
scandal demonstrates is the ease with which a wily top White House official
can subvert the Bill of Rights' protection of the free press to serve the
tawdriest of political ends.
Robert Scheer is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
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