The Plame Game (1)

For those of you who just crawled out of a bunker today, like Mr Cheney, the continuing fall-out from the White House exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame has now entered the twilight zone. In their attempts to somehow spin this problem away, the White House has followed the usual MO for dealing with problems. First, ignore the problem, depending on the corporate press to go along, and hope it will go away. If that doesn't work, the White House then 'confronts' the issue, trying to redefine it and putting out the story that there's nothing here, so move along. If those Arab sympathizers and terrorist supporters in the press and the Democratic party persist, attack them as 'unpatriotic' and 'shrill partisans' and characterize the stories as dangerous to 'national security' in time of "The War on Terror ®" (© FOX News). Next, accuse Clinton of doing the same thing. If an uproar continues, bury it with an FBI or (GOP-led) Congressional investigation, which is then itself buried in the guise of national security.

How'm I doing so far?

In 1999, President George H. W. Bush said that "I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the names of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors." When Mr. Rove or his political operatives expose an active CIA agent involved in clandestine work on 'weapons of mass destruction,' the White House sits on an obvious leak for 2 months. Despite this, the murmurings in the press (and in blogs both right and left) continue to grow. Eventually, the Bush administration is forced to admit it has a problem. Even head Bush cheerleader Karen Hughes says the leak is a bad thing. She does say that serial liar Karl Rove was not the source of the leak "because he said [to Mrs. Hughes] that he was not involved."

Now the press are all over this - on to plan B. Let's trot out reliable GOP mouthpiece Novak, who exposed the agent in the first place. [As an aside, as I've written, I'm just not clear why people are not calling for Mr. Novak's head and why he has not been arrested. In the past, when I had security clearance before my subscription to "The People's Daily" was discovered, I knew that, if I came into possession of secret information, I was not to expose it and to inform the security officers at the 'plant.' Novak is called by White House operatives, I suspect either on the express direction or with the knowledge of Mr. Rove, and is told of the identity of a CIA agent working under cover, and then blabs it to the public. If he had not written anything, like the other 6 reporters called by the White House, the agent would have been secure and there would have been no crime. So why is he not charged? I guess if Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been reporters, they would have gome free. And then Mark Shields goes on the News Hour and calls Novak a patriot? I've lost all respect for Mr. Shields.]

So here's Mr. Novak's spin (nicely summarized by John McCrory, among others). First, in the original column, Mr. Novak writes,

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report.

David Corn then reports in the Nation that,

Novak tells me that he was indeed tipped off by government officials about Wilson's wife and had no reluctance about naming her. "I figured if they gave it to me," he says, "They'd give it to others....I'm a reporter. Somebody gives me information and it's accurate. I generally use it."

For those of you who think that is not clear enough, there's this from Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce Newsday story

Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

Realizing they had a problem on their hands, the White House call Novak who begins to backtrack. On Crossfire Sept. 29, Mr. Novak responds

Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July, I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing.

Caught in the lie, Novak lies and dissembles further in the next column. He argues first, it wasn't a 'planned leak' (?), and, anyway, "the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson's wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else" conveniently ignoring the fact he was talking to the White House not the CIA, who would neither confirm or deny the story to anyone without security clearance. Besides, he lamely adds, "it was not much of a secret." Then he again relies on an unnamed source for the lies that Mrs. Plame has been an analyst, not in covert operations.This phase of the spin didn't work so well. It was quickly determined that Mrs. Plame actually was a covert operative involved, of all things, in tracking nuclear proliferation. So, the Bush administration, in a fit of adolescent pique, destroy a CIA source for the security problem they ostensibly are most concerned with.

Now, pissed, the gloves come off. Novak, after pointing out in his first column that Mr. Wilson actually served in Baghdad in the run up to the first Gulf War under Bush 1, labels him in the next column a Clinton appointee. To back up his charge that Wilson is some sort of Dem partisan, he notes that Wilson contributed to the campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry, leaving out the fact that Wilson also gave twice as much money to George W. Bush in the last election. GOP flack and Oxy-Contin addict Rush Limbaugh jumps on the band-wagon also saying Wilson can't be trusted as he is a "Clinton holdover," conveniently omitting the fact that he was actually appointed by Bush 1. Mr. McClellan, the White House press secretary, personally attacks Mr. Wilson saying he is untrustworthy
because he backed off from his original assertion that Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist, was responsible for the leak.

The GOP line that Wilson is a liar because he back-tracked on Rove accusation hardly inspires confidence. Mr. Wilson perhaps moderates his views in the face of new information (the White House itself was telling us it wasn't Mr. Rove who leaked the story) and that is termed a lie. In my mind Rove is still a suspect and this statement by Wilson that he doesn't know for sure is hardly an exoneration of Herr Rove.

Well, further on down the rabbit hole in the next post.

Posted by Gordon at October 02, 2003 12:34 PM | E-mail Author