Now the piling on starts. In about a week or so the Republicans will realize they’re going to need an actual presidential candidate. Because unlike Reagan, who was a Teflon professional, Shrub’s a rank amateur. Nothing stuck to Reagan, but Dubya will never be able to scrape the crap he’s about to walk through off his boots. No way will the latest misstep by Bush’s thugs get past more than a handful of additional news cycles before the current administration begins to disintegrate.
In early July, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV disclosed in a New York Times article that he had been asked by the CIA to visit Niger to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from the country. Wilson concluded that the allegations were “highly doubtful.” This was a crippling and embarrassing blow to Bush who was still steadfastly denying that he mislead the country into war. Crippling because it was yet more evidence that Bush knew his State of the Union claim about Iraq trying to buy uranium in Africa was fabricated from whole cloth. Embarrassing because former Ambassador Wilson ain’t no piker; he had been a State Department officer in Niger in the 1970s and was the last U.S. ambassador to Iraq before the first Gulf War.
Two days after Wilson’s disclosure, Robert Novak sealed Shrub’s unelectable fate when he wrote a widely syndicated piece in which he claimed that “two senior administration officials” told him that the wife of the former ambassador was employed by the CIA as an “Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” Novak outed the agent by name and his single paragraph will be remembered historically for unintentionally bringing down the Bush II presidency:
“Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, XXX, 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. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. ‘I will not answer any question about my wife,’ Wilson told me.”
Two days after Novak’s piece ran, The Nation‘s David Corn broke the alleged Novak leak as evidence of a possible Bush administration crime asking the question that finally, more than two months late, has the corporate media circling like buzzards:
“Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security—and break the law—in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?”
Corn spelled out the legal consequences of the Bush administration’s alleged disclosures to Novak:
“This is not only a possible breach of national security; it is a potential violation of law. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, it is a crime for anyone who has access to classified information to disclose intentionally information identifying a covert agent. The punishment for such an offense is a fine of up to $50,000 and/or up to ten years in prison. Journalists are protected from prosecution, unless they engage in a ‘pattern of activities’ to name agents in order to impair US intelligence activities. So Novak need not worry.”
By late July, the CIA had sent a letter to the Justice Department raising concerns about the alleged leak to Novak. At about the same time Wilson, in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show, accused the Bush administration of disclosing his wife’s identity “to intimidate others and keep them from stepping forward.” Wilson has also repeatedly stated that he believes President Bush’s chief of staff, Karl Rove, authorized the alleged leak to discredit him by retaliating against his wife.
Prepare yourself for a new verb that will shortly enter the vernacular: Roved, as in, “you’ve been Roved.”
Within the past few days—and especially yesterday—the corporate media has finally seen fit to take up the story of possible criminal activity in the Bush II administration. Over the weekend, MSNBC.com reported that the CIA has requested a Justice Department investigation into the alleged Novak leak. On Sunday, the Washington Post‘s Mike Allen and Dana Priest filed a report that seems to corroborate the alleged Novak leak: “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.” If the Washington Post allegation is true, this is not a leak; it’s a campaign.
The wheels fell off yesterday when White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez directed White House staffers to preserve materials relevant to the investigation and White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s daily media briefing spun wildly out of control. McClellan was repeatedly asked what President Bush intended to do about the alleged campaign against Wilson and his wife. Each time his response was that Bush intended to do nothing; that Karl Rove, specifically, was not a source of the alleged leak; and that the Justice Department was the appropriate agency to conduct the investigation. That would be John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, the Bush appointee who lost his bid for Senate re-election to a dead man. Interestingly, when asked if he was “convinced that there was no White House involvement” in the alleged leak, McClellan did not answer.
Again, David Corn had a good account of the day. But Jerome Doolittle, one of Jimmy Carter’s former speechwriters who knows a thing or three about how quickly things can go wrong with the Washington press corps, having worked in Carter’s press office during the 1976 presidential campaign, had the best coverage. In his article, “The Poodle Turns,” Doolittle was as scathing of the corporate media as he was of the alleged leak/campaign:
“What roused the sleeping lapdogs at last was Bush’s proposal to have the Justice Department investigate charges that Karl Rove leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent to columnist Robert Novak. Why, the reporters wondered logically, didn’t Bush just call Rove in and ask him?”
There seems to be little doubt that if there was a leak it either originated with, or at least was hand-approved by, Karl Rove. James C. Moore, co-author of Bush’s Brain, summed things up succinctly in “The Truth is Puttin’ on its Shoes.”
The outing of a CIA agent under nonofficial cover for any reason, under any circumstances, is a serious matter. Doing it to send a political signal is heinous. More serious still is how the Bush administration will likely react. How the other shoe will drop, so to speak.
An Ashcroft Justice Department will most likely go after the group of six Washington journalists, if it goes after anyone at all in this matter. A 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling supported the limited constitutional protections afforded journalists from being forced to give up their notes or identify their sources, and several court challenges since then have held that journalists should be considered the last source of such information, if at all. That the Ashcroft Justice Department will follow such tradition seems highly unlikely since even a minor gaining of ground will have an enormous chilling effect on other whistleblowers daring to come forward.
Ashcroft has the USA PATRIOT Act in his hip pocket. And he’s already demonstrated that he has no compunction against using it in ways in which it was never intended. Last month Wired News’ Noah Shachtman reported that the FBI would demand reporters’ notes related to hacker Adrian Lamo who is alleged to have broken into the networks of Cingular and the New York Times. In an especially cruel twist, the USA PATRIOT Act makes it illegal for journalists to disclose that they’ve been subpoenaed.
The more Shrub and his thugs circle the drain, the more I’m reminded of a bumper sticker slogan my wife continues to point out to me: “When Clinton lied, nobody died….”
Note: I’ve decided to redact the name of the woman identified by Novak. Pot. Kettle. Black. And all that.
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