- Ah, for a scandal to while away the sticky days of high
summer in the capital of the free world. This one has the lot. Featured
ingredients include a glamorous CIA agent, a jailed journalist and a scandal-starved
Washington press in hot pursuit of dastardly White House shenanigans. At
the centre of the storm is Karl Rove, George Bush's closest adviser, architect
of his election triumphs and attributed with satanic political powers by
reporters and frustrated Democrats alike.
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- At one level, the affair about who leaked the identity
of Valerie Plame, former diplomat's wife and CIA undercover operative,
is utterly baffling. A special prosecutor has been on the case for almost
two years, but no one has been indicted; indeed it is not even clear any
crime has been committed. The journalist who published the agent's name
goes about his business seemingly without a care in the world, but another
reporter who never wrote a word about Ms Plame languishes in a suburban
Washington jail for refusing to divulge her source for the same information.
For once in a city where everyone claims to have the inside track, no one
is sure what is going on.
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- But in another way, everything is blindingly simple.
The Plame leak may not be a scandal in itself. Unquestionably, it is a
dirty outgrowth of a real Washington scandal for which no one has been
held accountable: the misuse and distortion of prewar intelligence about
Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction, that the US and
Britain used to justify their unprovoked invasion of Iraq.
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- The story begins back in late 2001, when Italian intelligence
apparently stumbled upon evidence that Saddam had been trying to buy yellowcake
uranium in Niger, a material for the production of enriched uranium for
a nuclear weapon. Vice-President Dick Cheney urged the CIA to look into
the allegations.
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- The agency decided to send former ambassador Joseph Wilson,
an Africa hand with good contacts in Niger. He also happened to be married
to Ms Plame, a CIA operative who suggested to her bosses that her husband
might be the perfect person for the job. During an eight-day stay in February
2002, Mr Wilson found nothing to support the charges, and in early March
that year told as much to the CIA, whose report was sent to the White House.
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- But the Bush administration was bent on war. Again and
again, the President and his advisers warned of how they could not wait
for the "smoking gun that could be a mushroom cloud". Swayed
by the scaremongering, Congress voted in October 2002 to give the administration
carte blanche to use force against Saddam.
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- By this time, the CIA and State Department intelligence
had major doubts about the nuclear claims, but Mr Bush plunged on regardless.
To Mr Wilson's amazement, the President uttered the notorious claim in
his January 2003 State of the Union address, that British intelligence
has learned that Saddam had "recently sought significant quantities
of uranium in Africa". Advised that the Niger claim was highly dubious
by his own intelligence services and State Department, President Bush decided
to use it anyway, sourcing it to London. Shortly afterwards, the original
documents discovered in Italy were revealed as blatant fakes.
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- But by then the invasion was all but under way, and Mr
Cheney maintained on its very eve that Saddam had "reconstituted"
nuclear weapons.
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- The dictator was duly toppled, but no nuclear weapons
or ongoing nuclear programme were found, nor any WMD. On both sides of
the Atlantic, questions grew, and finally an exasperated Mr Wilson went
public.
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- In a New York Times op-ed piece on 6 July 2003, entitled
"What I didn't find in Africa", he accused the Bush team of distorting
intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. The impact was huge. This
was a serious and credible critic, not a politician with an agenda, but
a career ambassador who had served under the first President George Bush
and had on occasion even voted Republican. An angry and embarrassed White
House admitted that the yellowcake claim should not have appeared in the
State of the Union address.
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- And in its fury, it sought revenge by diminishing the
stature of Mr Wilson.
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- Thus began the Plame affair. The White House was out
to discredit Mr Wilson and minimise the importance of his mission, and
did so in a whispering campaign. In the next few days, Mr Rove and Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, Mr Cheney's powerful chief of staff, talked
to various journalists, including Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and the
conservative columnist Robert Novak.
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- Their message was plain: Mr Wilson had not been sent
by Mr Cheney, but by low-level CIA people at the urging of his wife. The
report had never reached the desk of anyone who really mattered, they said.
Mr Wilson himself was just a Democrat with a grudge.
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- The onslaught also served the purposes of the White House
hawks' running bureaucratic war with more sceptical CIA analysts, who had
no time for Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile then the darling of Mr Cheney
and the Pentagon, who was the source of much "information" about
Saddam's WMD capabilities.
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- Before the war, the CIA had come under fierce pressure
from the Vice-President's office to come up with the scariest assessment
possible of the threat posed by Iraq. Thus the Wilson article could be
construed as an "I-told-you-so" CIA-inspired counterstrike. On
14 July, Mr Novak's column appeared, identifying Ms Plame by both name
and job. The CIA was furious at what seemed a clear breach of the 1982
law which makes it a crime to deliberately disclose the name of a cover
agent. Thus special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald launched the investigation
which now laps at the innermost citadels of the White House.
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- >From the outset, Mr Rove was a prime suspect. He
was said to have told reporters that Ms Plame was "fair game".
But the White House adamantly denied Mr Bush's adviser was the leaker and
the affair soon faded. But Mr Fitzgerald was not to be deterred, and turned
up the pressure on the reporters involved in the case to divulge their
sources. Some made deals, among them, apparently, Mr Novak. By contrast,
Judith Miller of The New York Times held out. She is now an inmate at the
federal detention centre in Alexandria, Virginia.
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- But Mr Cooper - or rather his employers at Time magazine
- folded. It quickly transpired that he had talked to Mr Rove and Mr Libby.
The former, it seems, did not identify Mr Wilson's wife by name, but confirmed
that she was a CIA employee "working in WMD". Suddenly, Scott
McClellan, the hapless White House spokesman, started to sound like Ron
Ziegler, his counterpart of three decades ago who had to explain away the
"third-rate burglary" that would bring down President Richard
Nixon.
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- No one is suggesting Mr Bush is involved, but the previous
assertions of Mr Rove's innocence are clearly "inoperative",
to borrow an old Zieglerism. And would the Bush crowd go the "limited,
moderated hangout route" taken by their Nixonian forbears, admitting
small errors to deflect attention from genuinely criminal behaviour?
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- As Democrats bayed for Mr Rove's head, and Mr McClellan
went into hedgehog mode, Mr Bush subtly shifted his defence. A year ago
he was promising to "take care of" individuals involved with
the leak. On Monday, anxious to protect the aide whose skills helped win
him the White House, the President declared that only a person who had
committed a criminal offence would be dismissed.
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- The difference is crucial. On the basis of what has thus
far been established, no crime may have been committed under the 1982 Act,
passed to deter a would-be imitator of Philip Agee, the renegade CIA agent
who deliberately blew the cover of hundreds of his colleagues in a book
in 1975. Love or loathe Karl Rove or Scooter Libby, they are no Philip
Agees. As matters stand, Mr Wilson's fantasy of Mr Rove being "frogmarched
out of the White House in handcuffs" will remain just that.
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- In short, this "scandal" is more Alice in Wonderland
than Watergate. For all the kerfuffle, no crime may have been committed.
And Ms Plame had been a less-than-secret agent, working in Washington for
the past few years, her identity known to many. The journalist in prison
is not the one who divulged her name. And The New York Times, among the
loudest of all in its demands for a prosecutor, has learnt the age-old
lesson of "be careful what you wish for".
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- Many believe Mr Fitzgerald is no longer investigating
a leak, but whether any witnesses perjured themselves in testimony to the
grand jury. Is that really worth a journalist's act of conscience? It is
not clear whether other sources are involved beyond Mr Libby and Mr Rove.
Might a journalist even have been a source, as he (or she) traded information
with his contact in time-honoured Washington fashion? Mr Rove is believed
to have told the grand jury he learnt Ms Plame's identity from Mr Novak.
Only Mr Fitzgerald's final report, expected in October, can answer these
questions with certainty.
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- A key element in the investigation is a confidential
State Department memo, dated 10 June 2003, sent only to Colin Powell, then
Secretary of State, the day after Mr Wilson's article appeared, as General
Powell was travelling with President Bush in Africa. The memo deals with
State Department doubts about the uranium-from-Niger story, and identifies
Ms Plame (named as Valerie Wilson) in a paragraph marked "secret".
The question is, who at the White House saw this memo, and thus could be
a source of the leak? The Plame affair is a classic example of how this
White House, backed by a battle-hardened Republican attack machine, operates.
It has shown again that the Bush team cannot tolerate dissenting opinion.
As Mr Bush put it after 9/11: "Either you are with us or against us."
And Mr Rove appears to have lost none of his well-documented talents as
master of the smear.
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- All of this spells trouble, sapping the administration's
moral authority and resurrecting accusations of misuse of pre-war intelligence.
Its carefully cultivated reputation for straight dealing is at risk. And
this President's equivocations over how he would punish anyone involved
sounds rather like that of his predecessor Bill Clinton, of "it depends
what the meaning of 'is' is" fame.
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- And the Rove controversy is just one problem for Mr Bush.
Iraq becomes more of a mess by the day. The Senate still refuses to confirm
his nominee, John Bolton, as ambassador to the UN. At home, his hopes of
reforming social security are foundering. Most indicative of all perhaps
are acts of defiance by various Congressional Republicans, for whom re-election
in 2006 - in some cases a possible White House run in 2008 - is more important
than loyalty to Mr Bush. All are signs of the "second-termitis"
that seems to afflict every re-elected president.
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- Despite Ms Miller's imprisonment, the Plame affair is
unlikely to be a landmark in the struggle for press freedom. In laying
bare the Watergate scandal, the use of secret sources rendered a service
to the nation. In this case, the confidentiality issue involves sources
who may have committed a crime. Today, Ms Miller is a heroine. But not
long ago, she was prominent in publishing the WMD misinformation provided
by an unidentified source named Ahmad Chalabi.
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- And so the wheel comes full circle. This tacky, third-rate
leak that is starting to scar the President's second term springs from
the great deception executed in his first term, luring the US into a war
that 60 per cent of Americans now believe was misconceived.
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- That is the true scandal, which has yet to be properly
explained.
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- The outing of Valerie Plame
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- 2002
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- MARCH: Joseph Wilson returns from a mission to Africa
and reports to the CIA that he believes allegations Iraq tried to buy uranium
are "bogus". The agency sends a memo to the White House on 9
March summarising his findings.
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- SEPTEMBER: A British intelligence dossier, used to justify
war on Iraq, says Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Africa.
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- 2003
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- 28 JANUARY: George Bush, in his State of the Union address,
includes the statement: "The British Government has learnt that Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
He does not mention that US agencies questioned the validity of the British
intelligence.
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- 7 MARCH: International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed
ElBaradei tells the UN Security Council the uranium claim is based on fake
documents.
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- 6 JULY: In an article in The New York Times, Mr Wilson
reveals that he is the retired diplomat who visited Niger. He claims the
administration "twisted" intelligence to "exaggerate"
the Iraqi threat.
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- 8 JULY: Karl Rove discusses Mr Wilson's trip and the
role that Mr Wilson's wife may have played in initiating that trip with
the journalist Robert Novak, who in the course of the conversation identifies
Mr Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, by her maiden name.
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- 14 JULY: In his column, Mr Novak names Mr Wilson's wife
as an "agency operative on weapons of mass destruction" in a
piece about the fallout from Mr Wilson's article.
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- 2004
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- 10 JUNE: President Bush answers "Yes" when
asked by a journalist, "Do you stand by your pledge to fire anyone
found" to have leaked CIA operative Ms Plame's name?
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- 2005
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- 6 JULY: The New York Times reporter Judith Miller is
jailed for refusing to testify before the grand jury, even though she did
not publish the name of the agent. Matthew Cooper of Time magazine agrees
to comply, saying he had received a specific waiver from his source to
do so.
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- © 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article300731.ece
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