plame scandal update

Let me just say something about leaks in Washington. There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. There's leaks at the executive branch; there's leaks in the legislative branch. There's just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.

And so I welcome the investigation. I -- I'm absolutely confident that the Justice Department will do a very good job. There's a special division of career Justice Department officials who are tasked with doing this kind of work; they have done this kind of work before in Washington this year. I have told our administration, people in my administration to be fully cooperative.

I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business.

Tuesday's directive was an unsettling novelty for the staff of a president who won office vowing to restore "honor and integrity" to the Oval Office, who railed against leaks that threatened lives and who has so far largely weathered controversies without a hint of criminal inquiry.

No one can yet say where the F.B.I.'s investigation will lead (most leak investigations lead nowhere), or whether it will produce any evidence of wrongdoing. But in this case, the accusation itself does political damage, at a minimum giving new life to last summer's investigation into whether the White House cherry-picked evidence about Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons and buried dissenting views.

It could hardly come at a worse time. Just when President Bush's job approval ratings are slipping, when his would-be Democratic rivals are stepping up their criticism of his rationale for war in Iraq and his handling of the aftermath, and when Mr. Bush would prefer to focus on winning support for rebuilding Iraq — and a second term in office.

Already, the matter has prompted rare intramural sniping from anonymous administration officials and at least tentative expressions of concern from Republicans on Capitol Hill. "It reopens all the old tensions, between the White House and the C.I.A., between the foreign policy types and the political types, between the different parts of the Administration that saw the Iraqi threat differently," one senior administration official said. "That's why it poses the threat of making a real mess."

What sets this case apart is that it was a Bush administration official who turned (anonymously) on other Bush administration comrades. We know this because on Sunday Post writers Mike Allen and Dana Priest reported that "a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife." The senior Bush administration official told The Post, "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge." Asked about the motive for disclosing the behavior of other administration officials, the purported whistleblower said the leaks were "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility."

...But it seems to us that President Bush ought to be interested on another level too. The use by an administration insider of classified information for political or vindictive purposes would be, if true, an egregious abuse of the public trust. After initially handling all inquiries about the matter dismissively, the White House now says that the president regards the disclosure of a CIA operative's name as "a very serious matter" and that he has vowed to fire anybody responsible for such actions. Leak investigations seldom bear fruit, but in this case the president may have an opportunity to show whether he means what he says.

Wilsongate is not Watergate. But at the moment, if you're breathing the autumnal air inside the Beltway, it sure feels like it.

The mystery of who in the Bush administration outed Joe Wilson's wife as a CIA operative has the White House in full damage control mode, the Democrats in full outrage mode and the press in full investigative mode (at least those reporters who didn't get the potentially illegal leaks).

If it is nevertheless true, however -- an important "if" -- then a Pandora's box gets opened by asking this question: if the White House was willing to commit an overtly illegal act in dealing with such a piddling matter, what lines have they crossed on not-so-piddling matters? In other words, if this turns out to be true, then suddenly do all of the crazy conspiracy theories acquire a thin veneer of surface plausibility?

I say this as a registered Republican. I am on record giving contributions to the George Bush campaign. This is not about partisan politics. This is about a betrayal, a political smear, of an individual who had no relevance to the story. Publishing her name in that story added nothing to it because the entire intent was, correctly as Ambassador Wilson noted, to intimidate, to suggest that there was some impropriety that somehow his wife was in a decision-making position to influence his ability to go over and savage a stupid policy, an erroneous policy, and frankly what was a false policy of suggesting that there was nuclear material in Iraq that required this war. This was about a political attack. To pretend it was something else, to get into this parsing of words.

I tell you, it sickens me to be a Republican to see this.

Now, one might also surmise that an American monitoring weapons proliferation might report back to the CIA (and in the case of the Iraqi weapons inspectors circa 1998, they'd be right). In addition, to whatever extent her position may have carried risk of suspicion, CIA may well have decided that the potential benefits were worth it. After all, the fact that many diplomatic personnel are *suspected* of being spies doesn't deter some of them from actually being so.

But whether someone *figures out on their own* Plame was covert op is irrelevant. The only questions here are 1) was she -- and there seems to be little reason to question that she was, given that the CIA appears to have confirmed as much -- and 2), did Administration officials blow that cover. Even if it was a flimsy cover, blowing it was still illegal.

Well, Glenn, and other patriots, Wilson was appointed by that hotbed of leftwing insurgency, the office of the Vice President. Was it done by Cheney personally? He says not, but let's just say his trackrecord in the whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth department isn't unblemished.

So I guess it was just the hero track record in Gulf War I and the high regard he was held in by an earlier President Bush that got him the gig. Something like that.

The mistake that seems to have been made, Glenn, is that in hiring Wilson the VP's office interpretted Wilson's fine service to Bush I as evidence of partisanship rather than as what it was, evidence of integrity.

The fact that administration officials took it upon themselves to expose a CIA agent shows appalling judgment. They didn't know whether or not that endangered any CIA operations, which is why you just don't do this. And the fact that they did it for such base (and trivial) reasons says a lot about the kind of people they are.

But beyond that, of course the fundamental issue here is that — especially in a post-9/11 world — you don't play games with national security. Regardless of whether blowing Plame's network caused any serious problems, this is the reason the CIA is fighting back so hard on this: because they want to make sure no one ever does it again. Next time it might get a city full of people killed.

So: this affair exposes bad character and high school freshman levels of poor judgment among allegedly senior officials. But it also betrays a lack of seriousness about national security at a time when national security should be the most important thing they're thinking about.

This scandal should have unfolded in July, but the mainstream media weren't interested. The story was kept alive because of dogged work by a few online bloggers, most especially Josh Marshall of "TalkingPointsMemo" (you can find him in the blogs section of www.startribune.com/2cents ). The bloggers will never get the attention and the high praise they deserve for keeping attention focused on this. So let it be noted here at least.

It finally hit the mainstream last weekend, when NBC reported that CIA Director George Tenet had requested a Justice Department investigation of the case.

The story has gotten tangled like a rat's nest in the spinning that has gone on since. Bush spokesman Scott McClellan has tried to back and fill every way he could. But for once the White House press corps has refused to act like a bunch of whipped puppies.

On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that an "administration official" told its reporters "two White House officials leaked the information [on Plame] to selected journalists to discredit Wilson." The Post also said that, according to "White House aides," Bush had no intention of asking his senior staff about the leak.

So now you have both Novak and the Washington Post saying that two senior administration officials were the leakers and Bush refusing to take it seriously.

The Justice Department has responded affirmatively to Tenet's request for an investigation. But get this: When Justice informed the White House of the investigation Monday evening, it said it would be all right if the staff was notified Tuesday morning to safeguard all material that related to the case. The staff had all night to get rid of anything incriminating.

That incredible tidbit supports calls by Democrats and a slew of others for Attorney General John Ashcroft to appoint a special counsel to investigate this case. They're right: Ashcroft has no credibility in this, and neither does the White House, given its habitual effort to spin information, mislead the American people and smear anyone who disagrees with it.

If the version of events recounted in the Post is true, this was not a rogue mid-level employee acting in a moment of bad judgment. This was a project --- an organized, calculated effort by top people in the administration to exact petty political revenge no matter what the impact to national security.

People who would do that have no place in positions of grave responsibility. Their place is in prison.

Sorry, Bob, but the train carrying your "integrity and credibility" left the station some time ago. When you change your version of crucial aspects of your own story, nothing you say about this can be believed any longer, unless every other Disciple swears to it, as well. And if at least one of them isn't a Republican.

...[W]e are reminded that both Wilson and his wife have literally put their lives on the line in defense of Americans. Those people who treat this scandal as of no importance, who trivialize it, and who smear Wilson and his wife into the bargain should be deeply ashamed of themselves -- especially when they run no such risks themselves in any comparable way.

...Novak has been a reporter for over 40 years, and has talked to people in the intelligence community countless times, probably numbering in the thousands. What on earth did he think this CIA official meant when he said Plame might have "difficulties"? That customs might question her a little more closely than others? That a hotel wouldn't keep her reservation? That an airline might lose her luggage on purpose? This defies belief. Novak apparently wants us to think that a CIA official asking a reporter "not to use" an agent's name -- not to blow her cover -- was of absolutely no real significance, that revealing the name of an undercover agent might be only a minor inconvenience. By this ploy, Novak has forever removed himself from serious consideration on any subject in my view. He may as well retire now, and stop writing altogether. This is close to unforgivable. I repeat what I said earlier: this is about people's lives. Novak obviously cannot grasp that simple fact.

posted by Gregory Harris @ 10/1/2003 // //