Bush and Plame

On my recent trip to Denver to see my brother's graduation ceremony, my father and I talked a lot of politics, as we always do when we're together. My father is a lifelong Republican who has, to my knowledge, never voted for anyone but a Republican in any race above the local level. Nonetheless, he told me that he thinks the Bush administration is the single most corrupt administration in history (pretty incredible, given the last one!) and that he will be voting for anyone but Bush this fall.

Probably the biggest reason why he thinks that is the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson affair. Joseph Wilson is the former ambassador who served Bush's father as the last ambassador to Iraq before the initial Gulf war. He was asked by the CIA to go to Niger to investigate the infamous claim that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium from that country and concluded that the claim was false. Nevertheless, Bush used that claim in his state of the union speech. Wilson was surprised that they would send him to investigate, then claim the opposite of what he had reported to be true, and he wrote a NYT op-ed piece criticizing them for it. Shortly thereafter, the conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote in a column that two "senior administration officials" had told him that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.

It is against federal law to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA agent, and Plame was most certainly undercover. Her closest friends were shocked to find out that she was not just a private energy company consultant, the job she had for all the world to see, she was a CIA agent specializing in counter-proliferation - you know, stopping the spread of those weapons of mass destruction we hear so much about. The CIA went rather ballistic about this outing, as it put not only Plame and her family at risk, but all of the contacts and deep cover agents that she had spent 20 years developing and positioning in her work. In fact, as it turns out, they had asked Novak not to publish that information when he called to ask them about it, and he did it anyway.

Anyway, after months of stalling the administration finally agreed to an investigation to find out who had leaked it, but not an independent one - it would be handled by the Justice Department. And true to partisan form, the same legislators who thought it was unthinkable that the Reno DOJ could run a real investigation of Clinton had no problem with the Ashcroft DOJ investigating Bush, and vice versa. That investigation has convened a grand jury to hear testimony and hand down indictments if necessary, and according to this report that grand jury has been told by several witnesses that Bush himself knew about the outing and let it happen:

Witnesses told a federal grand jury President George W. Bush knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a covert CIA operative's name to a journalist in an attempt to discredit her husband, a critic of administration policy in Iraq.

Their damning testimony has prompted Bush to contact an outside lawyer for legal advice because evidence increasingly points to his involvement in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak.

The move suggests the president anticipates being questioned by prosecutors. Sources say grand jury witnesses have implicated the President and his top advisor, Karl Rove.

Now, I don't know if this report is accurate. The webmag it appears in doesn't exactly look like an objective and dispassionate news source. But it certainly wouldn't surprise me if it is entirely true. And there are two primary reasons why I think Wilson is 100% correct when he says that this was intentionally leaked from the highest levels in an attempt to punish him for daring to speak the truth about their claim on Iraq and Niger.

First, because no one in a low level position would know that Plame was a CIA agent. That's not the sort of information that run of the mill aide would know, only those with National Security Council connections would know that. And of course, Novak specifically cites "senior administration officials", not career bureaucrats.

Second, because in addition to Novak there are 5 other news agencies who came forward and said that administration officials had given them the same information, but they had chosen not to use it, for all of the reasons that Novak should have chosen not to use it. Obviously this was a concerted effort to get that fact out before the public. This was not an incidental, someone said something in conversation they shouldn't have kind of situation - this was a very intentional, blunt effort to get that story into the press.

What this demonstrates, more than anything, is that for the majority of those on the right, their cries of patriotism are hypocritical and beholden to partisan interests. Outing a CIA agent is a felony for a very good reason, because it jeopardizes lives and can destroy years of painstaking intelligence work. The Republicans love to charge the Democrats with undermining the intelligence agencies. Where is the outrage from them over this? It barely exists. If this had happened in a Democratic administration, they would quite literally be calling for treason charges, and I believe they'd be right to do so. But they have no problem throwing those principles boldy overboard to protect an administration they support (and of course, the Democrats would have been protecting that administration while they call for investigations of this one). That is shameful and hypocritical, and yet another reason not to take the partisans seriously on virtually anything.