Rovegate

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Op dinsdag 19 juli 2005 11:03 schreef PJORourke het volgende:

Iig heeft Ann als jurist de kennis om dat uit te leggen.

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Rove Death Watch, Part 2
Wherein your correspondent corrects some misconceptions.

Why aren't the major newspapers running editorials calling for Karl Rove's resignation? The Washington Post is silent. So is the Los Angeles Times. Maybe they're waiting for more information. But what more do they have to know? The White House deputy chief of staff revealed the identity of an undercover CIA employee to Time magazine. He did this solely for the purpose of attacking the credibility of an administration critic. He did not check first to find out whether said CIA employee was undercover. Or perhaps he knew and didn't care. Either way, such reckless behavior is a firing offense. Next case.

The New York Times weighs in today with uncharacteristic timidity. (I knew we were in for noncommittal chin-pulling when I saw the headline, "A Few Thoughts on Karl Rove." In editorial-ese, "A Few Thoughts on" is code for "We Can't Decide About.") The editorial states, erroneously, that Rove told Time's Matt Cooper that Wilson was sent to Niger "at the suggestion of his wife." Wilson was sent to Niger at the suggestion of his wife, but that's not what Rove told Cooper, according to Cooper's e-mail to his bureau chief as quoted by Newsweek, which is all we have to go on. According to Cooper's e-mail, Rove told him Wilson's wife "authorized the trip," which is not true. Rove's absurd insinuation seems to have been that only a girly-man would depend on his wife for work, and that a girly-man wouldn't know squat about weapons of mass destruction. Unless Cooper was garbling what Rove told him, we must conclude that Rove was passing along false information, perhaps with the recommendation that Cooper check it out, or perhaps not.

But I digress.

The Times editorial concludes by calling for Rove to … answer his critics at a press conference! Why not call for Rove's resignation? My guess is that the Times feels the issue of Rove's culpability in this matter is tangled up with the issue of how we came to discover it, i.e., through Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's bullying of the press. To call on Rove to resign, the Times may believe, would be to legitimize a rogue prosecution that's landed Times reporter Judy Miller in jail. If that is the Times's thinking, it's totally wrongheaded. Whether the courts should force reporters to reveal confidential sources is a separate issue from whether sources, after they've been unmasked, should be held accountable by their bosses for improper communications. The First Amendment does not and should not guarantee Karl Rove lifetime employment.

But what if Rove is … a whistle-blower? Yeah, that's it, he's a whistle-blower! This is the trial balloon floated in a Wall Street Journal editorial that the Republican National Committee is circulating madly. The argument is that Rove did a public service by alerting Time that Wilson

had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.

The biggest problem with this argument is that Wilson never said that Dick Cheney personally chose him to fly to Niger to check out rumors that Iraq was buying yellowcake uranium. To hear the GOP tell it, you'd think Wilson's story had Cheney punching his speed dial and asking, "How's that golf game going, you old so-and-so? What are you doing next Saturday? How'd you like to do me a little favor? Love to Val and the kids." What Wilson claimed in his July 2003 New York Times op-ed piece—the document whose purported falsity Rove was trying to expose—is as follows:

I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.

All true. I don't know what verbal shorthand Wilson used when discussing this matter "on the airwaves," but to the extent he emphasized this trip was instigated by Cheney, his point would have been not to indicate Cheney hand-picked him for the trip but rather to emphasize that the trip itself never would have happened had Cheney not ordered the CIA to assign it. Because the CIA had already concluded, correctly, it turns out, that the Iraqis had purchased no yellowcake.

But let's suppose that Wilson did indeed claim, falsely, that Cheney personally selected him to go to Niger ("Go get 'em, tiger!"). To blow the whistle on this lie, Rove still would have no logical need to expose Wilson's wife as a CIA employee. He could merely tell Time's Cooper, "Cheney did not select Wilson for the trip. Cheney has never met or spoken to Wilson in his life. Some faceless bureaucrat at the CIA picked Wilson." For Rove to add (falsely) that Wilson's wife authorized Wilson, or even to add (correctly) that Wilson's wife recommended Wilson to her superiors, would serve merely to castrate Wilson (at least in Rove's overheatedly macho imagination).

I hold no brief for Joe Wilson. This column has criticized him and his wife for cozying up to the glitterati, even at the expense of allowing Valerie Plame to be photographed without any disguise at the TriBeCa film festival. (Wilson had previously claimed that even after she was outed, Plame couldn't be photographed without a disguise because she needed to be protected from "some wacko in the street." The couple's subsequent decision to position Plame's face before the paparazzi suggests that their previous stance was pure theater.) Furthermore, although Wilson found no evidence that Iraq had purchased yellowcake from Niger, I believe that Wilson ought to have been more forthright about finding evidence that Iraq had indeed made some overtures toward purchasing yellowcake, though not in a way that the Senate intelligence committee deemed terribly significant. ("The language in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that 'Iraq also began vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake' overstated what the Intelligence Community knew…") Bush's famous 16 words about this in his State of the Union address remain hooey, but Wilson was sloppy, and perhaps a little dishonest, in criticizing them.

But this is not what Rove told Cooper. What Rove told Cooper was that Joe Wilson was married to a woman who worked for the CIA. He said this apparently without checking—as any minimally responsible person would do—whether this was information that needed to be kept secret. And that's the generous interpretation; it's possible (though doubtful, I think) that he passed along this information knowing that he was blowing Plame's cover and pretty much destroying her CIA career. (There has been some dispute about whether Plame was technically undercover when she was exposed. I apply a simple test: Did her friends and neighbors know she worked for the CIA? They did not. Ergo, she was undercover.)

Rove behaved in a way that was unacceptably heedless of national security concerns. He revealed a secret not to expose the truth, but to smear a political enemy. And, if Cooper's e-mail is precisely accurate, the smear wasn't even true. Some whistle-blower.

Coda: The White House and Bush are still stonewalling. But Rove may have taken one small step forward on the plank today. As I've noted before, Rove's departure will likely be signaled when the president starts saying things like, "I'm behind Karl 100 percent." (A few readers have asked me to provide a rational explanation for this paradox. I can't. It's just a mysterious Washington ritual, like the consumption of Senate bean soup.) Today's White House briefing included the following exchange:

Q: Scott, from Africa, Mrs. Bush says, Karl Rove is a very good friend of mine; I've known him for years. And she's not going to speculate on any other part of the case. Well, does the President feel the same way about Karl Rove, the relationship with Karl Rove, a very good friend for many years?

A: Yes, he does.

This is a departure from McClellan's previous stance, which was to state that Rove had the president's full confidence only insofar as anyone else who worked at the White House had the president's full confidence. Today McClellan personalized the president's relationship with Rove; he's a "good friend." The optimist in me interprets that as a subtle signal that the bloom is off the Turd Blossom.

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An innocent man?
Democrats are overeager to handcuff Rove

It's something of a stretch to call Karl Rove, the Machiavellian political advisor to President Bush, "innocent."
But in this case, he just might be.

And there's been something positively unseemly about the transparent glee with which many Democrats have been calling for Rove to be frog-marched out of the White House.

That glee is a form of tribute, really. It's an acknowledgement of just how successful (and ruthless) Rove has been, as a political strategist, in building Bush's political empire, and forging a solid Republican majority in Congress.

So why would he be so stupid as to leak Valerie Plame's name?

In the matter of Valerie Plame, it's entirely possible that Rove isn't the culprit, and is guilty of nothing more than talking about her to a reporter when, two years ago, the White House said that he had not. That doesn't mean he did so knowingly, or knew Plame was undercover, two aspects of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- a law that is extremely difficult to prosecute.

It could well be that Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer, is being entirely truthful when he says that Rove testified voluntarily before the federal grand jury, never invoked the Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, and has been assured by prosecutors that Rove is not a focus of the investigation into who leaked Plame's name.

In their zeal to nail Rove, liberals and progressives may be missing the real story here. Rove says he first learned about Plame's status from reporters. If so, somebody had to tell those reporters.

A clue as to who comes from who the reporters are. Matthew Cooper, Time correspondent, says he talked with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, after he talked with Rove. Libby has also claimed in the past not to have talked with reporters about Plame.

The leak originally hit print with Robert Novak, a columnist tight with Bush's neocon crowd. But the most intriguing figure is Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter previously most notorious as the credulous scribe who reprinted, on page one, mountains of pre-war lies about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, lies often sourced to Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi.

Chalabi was a favored protégé of the neocon war hawks who pushed the Bush White House into war, a cabal led by Cheney himself. Miller was their favored mouthpiece.

It's no stretch of the imagination to picture a situation in which the neocons were alarmed by the nerve former Ambassador Joseph Wilson struck with his revelations that the Bush team knew that accusations Hussein tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from the African country of Niger were not only false, but based on crude forgeries. Their preferred response was to go after the messenger -- to discredit Joseph Wilson, just as this administration has attacked Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, and various other high-profile critics of administration policy.

Karl Rove is not the only figure in the Bush administration who plays nasty. But these men are not stupid. They would not have leaked such an explosive secret about Plame, one that endangered CIA agents and compromised national security, without some level of deniability. One reason it's hard to imagine Rove as the culprit is that he's simply too smart to blurt out something like this.

Those people wanting Karl Rove's head probably aren't going to get it. There are too many doubts about his guilt, and he is too indispensable to George Bush, for Bush to fire him.

But that doesn't mean heads aren't going to roll somewhere. By all accounts, the investigation of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is expanding rapidly. It is probably, at this point, encompassing far more than the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

In all likelihood, this is about more than Karl Rove, more than simply getting back at Joseph Wilson for his criticisms of the administration. This is about taking on members of the Bush administration who were and are so committed to war, so committed to empire, that compromising national security is less important than maintaining the political momentum necessary to launch an illegal invasion.

In this way, the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity goes much more to the heart of the Bush administration than it would if it were a simple case of a political operative exacting vengeance. This is, once again, all about the lies that the Bush administration used to justify its war. As with the Downing Street Memos, we are learning more and more about just how desperate some members of the Bush administration were to have their war, no matter how flimsy the public rationale.

It's easy, and fun, to imagine Karl Rove in handcuffs. It's far more damning to get to the heart of what actually happened here. In all likelihood, Rove did not do what he is accused of.

But somebody did.

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CIA Agents Letter to US Senate and House

AN OPEN STATEMENT TO THE LEADERS OF THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES AND THE SENATE.

The Honorable Dennis Hastert, Speaker, U.S. House of Representatives

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader, U.S. House of Representatives

The Honorable Dr. William Frist, Majority Leader of the Senate

The Honorable Harry Reid, Minority Leader of the Senate


We, the undersigned former U.S. intelligence officers are concerned with the tone and substance of the public debate over the ongoing Department of Justice investigation into who leaked the name of Valerie Plame, wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and other members of the media, which exposed her status as an undercover CIA officer. The disclosure of Ms. Plame’s name was a shameful event in American history and, in our professional judgment, may have damaged U.S. national security and poses a threat to the ability of U.S. intelligence gathering using human sources. Any breach of the code of confidentiality and cover weakens the overall fabric of intelligence, and, directly or indirectly, jeopardizes the work and safety of intelligence workers and their sources.

The Republican National Committee has circulated talking points to supporters to use as part of a coordinated strategy to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. As part of this campaign a common theme is the idea that Ambassador Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame was not undercover and deserved no protection. The following are four recent examples of this "talking point":

Michael Medved stated on Larry King Live on July 12, 2005, "And let's be honest about this. Mrs. Plame, Mrs. Wilson, had a desk job at Langley. She went back and forth every single day."

Victoria Toensing stated on a Fox News program with John Gibson on July 12, 2005 that, "Well, they weren't taking affirmative measures to protect that identity. They gave her a desk job in Langley. You don't really have somebody deep undercover going back and forth to Langley, where people can see them."

Ed Rodgers, Washington Lobbyist and former Republican official, said on July 13, 2005 on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, "And also I think it is now a matter of established fact that Mrs. Plame was not a protected covert agent, and I don't think there's any meaningful investigation about that."

House majority whip Roy Blunt (R, Mo), on Face the Nation, July 17, 2005, "It certainly wouldn't be the first time that the CIA might have been overzealous in sort of maintaining the kind of top-secret definition on things longer than they needed to. You know, 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."

These comments reveal an astonishing ignorance of the intelligence community and the role of cover. The fact is that there are thousands of U.S. intelligence officers who "work at a desk" in the Washington, D.C. area every day who are undercover. Some have official cover, and some have non-official cover. Both classes of cover must and should be protected.

While we are pleased that the U.S. Department of Justice is conducting an investigation and that the U.S. Attorney General has recused himself, we believe that the partisan attacks against Valerie Plame are sending a deeply discouraging message to the men and women who have agreed to work undercover for their nation’s security.

We are not lawyers and are not qualified to determine whether the leakers technically violated the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. However, we are confident that Valerie Plame was working in a cover status and that our nation’s leaders, regardless of political party, have a duty to protect all intelligence officers. We believe it is appropriate for the President to move proactively to dismiss from office or administratively punish any official who participated in any way in revealing Valerie Plame's status. Such an act by the President would send an unambiguous message that leaks of this nature will not be tolerated and would be consistent with his duties as the Commander-in-Chief.

We also believe it is important that Congress speak with one non-partisan voice on this issue. Intelligence officers should not be used as political footballs. In the case of Valerie Plame, she still works for the CIA and is not in a position to publicly defend her reputation and honor. We stand in her stead and ask that Republicans and Democrats honor her service to her country and stop the campaign of disparagement and innuendo aimed at discrediting Mrs. Wilson and her husband.

Our friends and colleagues have difficult jobs gathering the intelligence, which helps, for example, to prevent terrorist attacks against Americans at home and abroad. They sometimes face great personal risk and must spend long hours away from family and friends. They serve because they love this country and are committed to protecting it from threats from abroad and to defending the principles of liberty and freedom. They do not expect public acknowledgement for their work, but they do expect and deserve their government’s protection of their covert status.

For the good of our country, we ask you to please stand up for every man and woman who works for the U.S. intelligence community and help protect their ability to live their cover.

Sincerely yours,

Larry C. Johnson, former Analyst, CIA


JOINED BY:

Mr. Brent Cavan, former Analyst, CIA

Mr. Vince Cannistraro, former Case Officer, CIA

Mr. Michael Grimaldi, former Analyst, CIA

Mr. Mel Goodman, former senior Analyst, CIA

Col. W. Patrick Lang (US Army retired), former Director, Defense Humint Services, DIA

Mr. David MacMichael, former senior estimates officer, National Intelligence Council, CIA

Mr. James Marcinkowski, former Case Officer, CIA

Mr. Ray McGovern, former senior Analyst and PDB Briefer, CIA

Mr. Jim Smith, former Case Officer, CIA

Mr. William C. Wagner, former Case Officer, CIA