[Mb-civic] Great Stuff from Michael

[Barbara Siomos]

WoW! Michael that/this is great stuff...

peace,
barbara

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Butler
Sent: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 17:24:45 -0700
To: Civic
Subject: [Mb-civic] Great Stuff from Michael


------ Forwarded Message


Highlights

Rove-gate: Who Leaked? Justin Raimondo
New Middle Eastern Paradigm: Alan Bock
Abuse Probes End: William Fisher
Extremism Alienates Most Muslims: Jim Lobe
Certainly Is Not Switzerland: Trish Schuh

Quotable
 You are not going to get peace with millions of armed men. The chariot of
peace cannot advance over a road littered with cannon.
 David Lloyd
Original Letters Blog Casualties of War Contact Donate!
           Home
           Who We Are
                      Search
           Free Newsletter
           Shop Antiwar.com
           Reprint Policy
           Submission Guidlines
           Syndication
      

 July 15, 2005
 Rove-gate: Who Leaked
 to the Leakers? 
 This isn't about Karl Rove
by Justin Raimondo

What if Karl Rove isn't guilty of knowingly leaking Valerie Plame's name as
a 
covert CIA agent involved in nuclear proliferation issues? What if Rove's
lawyer, Robert Luskin, is correct when he says that he's been assured by
prosecutors that his client is not a target of the ongoing investigation
into 
Plame-gate? I'm going to swim against the tide, here, and against the
expectations of 
my readers, by suggesting that this investigation isn't about Rove  and,
furthermore, that Rove is a victim, in an important sense, someone who was
used 
and abused by the real culprits. And who are these mysterious culprits?
We'll 
get to that in a moment, but first some background

One thing that has always struck me as odd about this whole affair  and I
wasn't the only one  is a seemingly minor detail: why did Novak's original
column, which started all this brouhaha, identify Valerie Plame by her
maiden 
name? After all, most married women  even in this era of Women's Liberation
 
defer to the tradition of taking their husband's name, but I have to admit
that, 
even after wondering about it for a brief moment, I shrugged and moved on
As 
it turns out, however, this is an important detail, because now we have
Rove's lawyer saying that he at no time gave out Valerie Plame's name: but
if Rove 
identified her as Joe Wilson's wife, what the heck is the difference?

The difference is that, as Valerie Plame, Mrs. Wilson was affiliated with a
CIA front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, engaged in tracking and
stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons. As soon as her name was made
public, the implications for U.S. national security amounted to a grave
breach  far 
more of a crime than merely violating the Intelligence Identities Protection
Act, which has only had a single prosecution since its passage in 1982. As
the 
Washington Post reported when the Plame scandal broke:

"A former diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity said yesterday that
every foreign intelligence service would run Plame's name through its
databases 
within hours of its publication to determine if she had visited their
country 
and to reconstruct her activities. 'That's why the agency is so sensitive
about just publishing her name,' the former diplomat said."

The publication of her maiden name not only endangered Valerie Wilson, but
also blew the cover of a CIA front and imperiled anyone she might have come
in 
contact with during her stint overseas. This isn't just a matter of of
violating a statute that, at most, entails a 10-year jail sentence and a
fine  this 
is a question of possible espionage.

What also seems fairly clear is that Karl Rove would not have had direct
knowledge of Plame-Wilson's covert activities on behalf of the CIA, and that
only 
a very few people high up in the national security bureaucracy had the
clearance to get access to her name. So who was it? If Rove leaked to Novak,
and  
half a dozen Washington reporters, then who leaked to the leakers?

This isn't about Rove.

It's about a cabal of war hawks inside the administration who passed on this
information to others without telling them about Plame-Wilson's deep cover
status, perhaps suggesting that she was just an analyst working at a desk
rather 
than a covert operative involved in a vitally important overseas operation,
the knowledge of which was highly compartmentalized and only dispensed on a
need-to-know basis. When Rove and his shills blabbed to reporters and anyone
who 
would listen, they didn't realize that they were aiding and abetting an
elaborate ploy to stick it to the CIA.

Seen against the backdrop of the fierce intra-bureaucratic war that broke
out 
in the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war  with the CIA and the
mainline intelligence and diplomatic communities pitted against civilian
neoconservatives in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the Office of the
Vice 
President  the outing of Plame and her colleagues amounts to an act of
espionage 
committed out of a desire to exact revenge. The leakers meant to retaliate
not just against Joe Wilson, through his wife, but against the "old guard"
that 
was resisting the campaign to lie us into war. When the CIA wouldn't go
along 
with the neocon program and "spice up" their analyses with Ahmed Chalabi's
tall tales and the outright forgery of the Niger uranium documents, the War
Party 
struck back at them with the sort of viciousness for which the neocons are
rightly renowned.

The neocons had a fix on their target; now the question was how to get
someone else to pull the trigger. The leakers, in order to protect
themselves, 
"laundered" the leak through journalists (Judith Miller, one of their
favorite 
conduits) and Bush operatives  Rove. In his book, The Politics of Truth,
Joe 
Wilson says as much:

"Apparently, according to two journalist sources of mine, when Rove learned
that he might have violated the law, he turned on Cheney and Libby and made
it 
clear that he held them responsible for the problem they had created for the
administration. The protracted silence on this topic from the White House
masks 
considerable tension between the Office of the President and the Office of
the Vice President.

"The rumors swirling around Rove, Libby, and Abrams were so pervasive in
Washington that the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, was
obliged to 
address them in an October 2003 briefing, saying of Rove: 'The president
knows 
he wasn't involved.  It's simply not true.' McClellan refused to be drawn
into a similar direct denial of Libby's or Abrams's possible involvement,
however."

Suddenly, the complacent  and often complicit  American media seems to be
waking up. Reporters are now publicly pillorying White House spokesman Scott
McClellan:

"QUESTION: You're in a bad spot here, Scott

"(LAUGHTER)

" because after the investigation began  after the criminal investigation
was under way  you said, October 10th, 2003, 'I spoke with those
individuals, 
Rove, Abrams and Libby. As I pointed out, those individuals assured me they
were not involved in this,' from that podium. That's after the criminal
investigation began. Now that Rove has essentially been caught red-handed
peddling 
this information, all of a sudden you have respect for the sanctity of the
criminal investigation.

"MCCLELLAN: No, that's not a correct characterization. And I think you are
well aware of that."

Reporters who heard McClellan's assurances back in October 2003 weren't
being 
deceived so much as lulled to sleep, and that really didn't take much of an
effort on the part of the administration, now did it? They were basically
asleep anyway, and weren't really listening to what was being said. Some
people 
were paying attention, however, and taking notes, Joshua Marshall for one:

"So, when McClellan was asked to be more clear, he opted for a meaninglessly
vague statement and then fell back on the 'leaking of classified
information' 
dodge. Can we all take note of this now? That denial wasn't what it seemed
to 
be. In fact, I doubt it was a real denial at all.

"There's more there. Why not find it?"

Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald is now in the process of finding it  and
Rove is not his real quarry, although he and some others in the White House
could 
wind up as collateral damage. By all indications, Bulldog's real target
points more in the direction of the Office of the Vice President. Ambassador
Wilson 
knows who his enemies are, and he pointed to them in his book and in an
interview with Joe Conason in Salon:

"Gleaned from all those crosscurrents of information, the most plausible
scenario, and the one that I've heard most frequently from different
sources, has 
been that there was a meeting in the middle of March 2003, chaired by either
[Cheney's chief of staff] Scooter Libby or the vice president  but more
frequently I've heard chaired by Scooter  at which a decision was made to
get a 
'work-up' on me. That meant getting as much information about me as they
could: 
about my past, about my life, about my family. This, in and of itself, is
abominable. Then that information was passed at the appropriate time to the
White 
House Communications Office, and at some point a decision was made to go
ahead 
and start to smear me, after my opinion piece appeared in the New York
Times."

"Salon: You mention two other names: John Hannah, who works in the Office of
the Vice President, and David Wurmser, who is a special assistant to John
Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and national security.
Last 
Wednesday, their names both appeared on a chart that accompanied an article
in 
the New York Times about the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and the war
cabal within the Bush administration. Did these people run an intelligence
operation against you?"

"Wilson: I don't know if it's the same unit, but it's very clear, from what
I've heard, that the meeting in March 2003 led to an intelligence operation
against my family and me. That's what a work-up is  to try to find
everything 
you can about an American citizen."

After the War Party met in solemn conclave, and the command went out from
Cheney: "Bring me the head of Joe Wilson!", there was only one logical place
for 
Cheney's minions to go. Who in the administration would've had access to the
specific information regarding Plame-Wilson's role in a deep-cover CIA
operation involving nuclear proliferation? Why, the man who was the State
Department 
deputy secretary in charge of "weapons of mass destruction"  the somewhat
irritable if not downright reckless John Bolton, would-be ambassador to the
UN, 
who played a central role in promulgating the Niger Uranium Myth.

Conveniently, two of Bolton's assistants, David Wurmser and John Hannah,
also 
worked in Cheney's office. A story by UPI's Richard Sale, published last
year, points at Cheney's office and specifically at Hannah as having played
a key 
role in all this:

"Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard
evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President
Dick 
Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity
last 
year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a
Justice Department official said.

"According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis
'Scooter' Libby, were the two Cheney employees. 'We believe that Hannah was
the 
major player in this,' one federal law-enforcement officer said.  The
strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah 'that he faces a real
possibility of 
doing jail time' as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal
law-enforcement official said."

Hannah is Cheney's Middle East policy point-man, and before that was
director 
of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Middle East expert
Juan Cole shines his reportorial flashlight on what's under that particular
rock:

"Libby and Hannah form part of a 13-man vice presidential advisory team,
sort 
of a veep NSC [National Security Council], which helps underpin Cheney's
dominance in the US foreign policy area. Hannah is a neoconservative and old
cold 
warrior who is really more of a Soviet expert than a Middle East expert. But
in the 90s he for a while headed up the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy (WINEP), a think tank that represents the interests of the American
Israel 
Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Hannah is said to have been behind
Cheney's and consequently Bush's support for refusing to deal with Yasser
Arafat. But 
he was also deeply involved in getting up the Iraq war."

The AIPAC connection should raise a red flag: AIPAC is already at the center
of a case involving espionage conducted by Israel against the United States,
with Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin indicted [.pdf] for passing classified
information on to longtime AIPAC leader Steve Rosen and his aide Keith
Weissman, 
with an Israeli embassy official, chief political officer Naor Gilon,
directly 
involved. In both cases, which involve the unlawful dissemination of
sensitive U.S. secrets, the defense is claiming that "everyone does it" and
that the 
classified information they're accused of leaking  or, in AIPAC's case,
directly handing over to the Israeli government  is supposedly "common
knowledge."

Treason is nothing to these people, because their real allegiance is not to
the U.S., but to their own cause, which is perpetual war. Libby and Hannah
were 
the enforcers who made sure that the lies put out by this administration to
bamboozle us into war with Iraq were strictly adhered to within the
government. 
Libby was a frequent visitor over at CIA headquarters, along with his boss,
and, as Juan Cole writes:

"[H]annah had fingers in all three rotten pies from which the worst intel
came  Sharon's office in Israel, the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (for
which 
Hannah served as a liaison to Cheney), and fraudster Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi
National Congress. Hannah had probably been the one who fed Cheney the Niger
uranium story, triggering a Cheney request to the CIA to verify it and
thence Joe 
Wilson's trip to Niamey in spring of 2002, where he found the story to be an
absurd falsehood on the face of it."

In short, Hannah was at the center of that vortex of deception that swept us
into a disastrous war. When Ambassador Wilson came out with his famous
debunking of the infamous "16 words," Hannah was well positioned to go after
the 
heretic.

If we look at the passing of this leak as we would a ball game, as "super
smart commenter Sara" pointed out on Digby's blog, the probable trajectory
of the 
ball as it makes its way to the goal goes something like this: "Bolton to
Wurmser and Hannah, to Cheney (and/or Libby) to Rove."

In this case, however, unlike soccer or basketball, possession of the ball
is 
not an asset: according to the rules of this game, the last man holding it
loses.

I do not believe for a moment that this lengthy and increasingly
controversial investigation is centered around alleged violations of a
rarely invoked 
statute, incurring a penalty that hardly seems proportionate to the energy
expended to get a conviction. It is extremely hard to prove that someone has
violated 
the Intelligence Identities Protection Act; there are all sorts of
conditions 
and sub-clauses that provide a legal escape route for anyone so charged:
that 
can't be what all this is about.

If, however, Fitzgerald can prove there was a conspiracy inside the
government to collect and selectively reveal classified information in order
to crush 
political opponents, and shape U.S. policy, then the charges could be much
more 
serious. By all accounts, the Plame investigation is said to be widening,
and 
I would venture to say that by this time is wide enough to include charges
of 
espionage. The mere existence of a highly placed cabal that was engaged in
collecting and utilizing highly sensitive information  a kind of
intelligence 
bank that existed outside of normal governmental channels  would be of
great 
interest to the FBI's counterintelligence unit, and word is out that they've
been plenty busy lately. Who made withdrawals from this Intelligence  Bank,
and 
did any of these account holders include foreign governments  such as Iran,
which received an intelligence treasure trove from neocon poster boy Ahmed
Chalabi, and Israel, which is already under suspicion because of  the
Franklin 
affair, and has close links to several of the suspects in the Plame-gate
investigation?

And then there is the question of the Niger uranium forgeries themselves:
who 
forged the documents that fooled a president? Wilson's exposure of the Niger
uranium ploy angered whoever introduced those documents into the U.S.
intelligence stream  it was Hannah and Libby, by all accounts, who fought
to keep 
these allegations in the president's speech, in spite of opposition from the
CIA 
and the State Department. The same crowd that pushed this phony intelligence
must have known something about the murky origins of what turned out to be a
crude forgery.

Forging "evidence" that helped get us into a war  what are the penalties
for 
that?

The fast developing scandal seemingly centered around Rove and a few
journalists has only begun to unfold. By the time it is over, we'll have the
War Party 
 or, at the very least, a few high profile representatives  in the dock,
and then the fun will really begin. So forget "Rove-gate" and get ready for
"Cheney-gate." I'll gladly forgo the pleasure of seeing the president's
chief 
political advisor frog-marched out of the White House for the prospect of
seeing 
our vice president, along with his top staffers, led out of the Eisenhower
Executive Office Building in handcuffs.

 Justin Raimondo

 
comments on this article?
send them to backtalk!
[visit backtalk!]
Back to the Antiwar.com Home Page



Archives

Rove-gate: Who Leaked
 to the Leakers?
 7/15/2005

Iraq: The Phony 'Withdrawal'
 7/13/2005

A Prescription for Fascism
 7/11/2005

London Terror Mystery
 7/7/2005

Iraq: A Right-Wing Alternate Reality Show
 7/6/2005

Summer Scandals
 7/4/2005

How to End the War: Negotiations Now!
 7/1/2005

Comrade Aaronovitch
 Strikes Again
 6/29/2005

Biden's BS on Iraq
 6/27/2005

Iraq: What Price 'Victory'?
 6/24/2005

Walter Jones, Patriot for Peace
 6/22/2005

The Great Awakening
 to the Iraq Deception
 6/20/2005

Behind the Downing Street Memos
 6/17/2005

Indictment Shows Washington Is 'Israeli-Occupied Territory'
 6/15/2005

Solzhenitsyn's Maxim
 6/13/2005

The Democratic Delusion
 6/10/2005

Catering to Kazakhstan's Kleptocracy
 6/8/2005

The War Party on Trial
 6/6/2005

Nancy Pelosi as 'Winged Victory'
 6/3/2005

Follow That 'Revolution'
 6/1/2005

Why Did Feith Resign?
 5/30/2005

The Pipeline From Hell
 5/27/2005

The Franklin Affair:
A Spreading Treason
 5/25/2005

Our Uzbek Problem, and Theirs
 5/23/2005

Uzbekistan: The Revolution Betrayed
 5/20/2005

Karimovs American Fan Club
 5/18/2005

Uzbekistan's Nightmare:
 Made in Washington
 5/16/2005

Iraq Falls Apart
 5/13/2005

America's Global Fifth Column
 5/11/2005


Commemorating a World War
 5/9/2005

Larry Franklin
 and the
 Axis of Espionage
 5/6/2005

The War Party's
 War on the Media
 5/4/2005

Iraq: 'Mission Accomplished'?
 5/2/2005

The Thirty Years War
 4/29/2005

In Defense of Marla Ruzicka
 4/27/2005

Prime Minister Chalabi?
 4/25/2005

Shaking Up Israel's Spy Nest
 4/22/2005

Waco as Metaphor
 4/20/2005

Our Bizarro World
 Foreign Policy
 4/18/2005

Cashing in on the Bush Doctrine
 4/15/2005

An Iraqi Potemkin Village
 4/13/2005

Trouble South of the Border
 4/11/2005

Israel Goes Extremist
 4/8/2005

Yushchenko's Gambit
 4/6/2005

In Defense of John Paul II, Peacemaker
 4/4/2005

'Dead Wrong'
 - or Outright Deception?
 4/1/2005

Iraq: An Exit Strategy
 3/30/2005

How the East Was Won
 3/28/2005

The Lesson of Kyrgyzstan
 3/25/2005

Kyrgyzstan's 'Revolution'
 3/23/2005

Dirty Tricks Revisited
 3/21/2005

The Character Assassins
 3/18/2005

Handmaiden of the State
 3/16/2005

Realists Rout Neocons
 3/14/2005

The Wonderful Wizard
of Washington
 3/11/2005

The Specter of Fascism
 3/9/2005

Who Killed Rafik Hariri?
 3/7/2005

A Fascist America
 3/4/2005

Lebanon's Hollow 
'Cedar Revolution'
 3/2/2005

'Politically Incorrect' History Has Neocons Steamed
 2/28/2005

A Pattern of Deception
 2/25/2005

They've Only Just Begun...
 2/23/2005

Iraq: Bush Must Negotiate
 2/21/2005

Sex, Lies, and Jeff Gannon
 2/18/2005

Syria in the Crosshairs
 2/16/2005
More Archives

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author
of 
An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books,
2000). He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost
Legacy of 
the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan),
(Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The
Case 
Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).

He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a Senior Fellow
at 
the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von
Mises Institute, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of
American 
Culture.

Reproduction of material from any original Antiwar.com pages
 without written permission is strictly prohibited.
 Copyright 2005 Antiwar.com



------ End of Forwarded Message


_______________________________________________
Mb-civic mailing list
Mb-civic at islandlists.com
http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic