...buried in one of the handful of federal court opinions that have come down in the last year ordering Matt Cooper and Judy Miller to testify or go to jail:
In February, Circuit Judge David Tatel joined his colleagues’ order to Cooper and Miller despite his own, very lonely finding that indeed there is a federal privilege for reporters that can shield them from being compelled to testify to grand juries and give up sources. He based his finding on Rule 501 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which authorizes federal courts to develop new privileges “in the light of reason and experience.” Tatel actually found that reason and experience “support recognition of a privilege for reporters’ confidential sources.” But Tatel still ordered Cooper and Miller to testify because he found that the privilege had to give way to “the gravity of the suspected crime.”
Judge Tatel’s opinion has eight blank pages in the middle of it where he discusses the secret information the prosecutor has supplied only to the judges to convince them that the testimony he is demanding is worth sending reporters to jail to get. The gravity of the suspected crime is presumably very well developed in those redacted pages. Later, Tatel refers to “[h]aving carefully scrutinized [the prosecutor’s] voluminous classified filings.”
Some of us have theorized that the prosecutor may have given up the leak case in favor of a perjury case, but Tatel still refers to it simply as a case “which involves the alleged exposure of a covert agent.” Tatel wrote a 41-page opinion in which he seemed eager to make new law -- a federal reporters’ shield law -- but in the end, he couldn’t bring himself to do it in this particular case. In his final paragraph, he says he “might have” let Cooper and Miller off the hook “[w]ere the leak at issue in this case less harmful to national security.”
Tatel’s colleagues are at least as impressed with the prosecutor’s secret filings as he is. One simply said “Special Counsel’s showing decides the case.”
All the judges who have seen the prosecutor’s secret evidence firmly believe he is pursuing a very serious crime, and they have done everything they can to help him get an indictment.
huffingtonpost.com
Rove these days, through an anonymous source (probably his attorney), is trying to deflect blame and attention to others, especially journalists, by throwing out one bizarre scenario after another to escape legal culpability. (Not surprisingly, even though Bush and Press Secretary Scott McClellan say the Administration will refuse to comment because there's an "official investigation" going on, Rove, through his surrogate, feels free to continue his attempts to comment on and shape the case.)
But, from what Fitzgerald has suggested, he and the grand jury long ago determined who the leakers were. That's not what is at issue now. The investigation is all tied in with the national-security matters talked about on those blacked-out eight pages.
And, a reasonable guess is that those pages deal in some fashion with the actions -- legal or illegal, overt or covert, actual or covered-up -- of the members of an inner council of Administration heavies called the White House Iraq Group.
Just one example of the WHIG's function and influence: "The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago [in 2002], including the introduction of the term 'mushroom cloud' into the debate, coincided with the formation of ... WHIG, a task force assigned to 'educate the public' about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it." (This quote comes from a groundbreaking 2003 article by investigative reporters Barton Gelman and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post.)
EENY MEENIE HUNT FOR WAR JUSTIFICATION
How did we get to Cheney and Rice scaring the population with talk of "mushroom clouds" and wild tales of Iraqi WMD that might be made available to al-Qaida terrorists?
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. It was 2002. The Administration already had decided to bomb and invade Iraq, but was having trouble figuring out how to manipulate the propaganda so as to fool Congress, the American people, and the international community into giving them permission to do so.
It was not smooth sailing. Not only were the Democrats and leakers within the CIA beating up on Bush's plans for war, but prestigious conservative Republican leaders, such as Gen. Brent Scowcroft, James Baker III, Dick Army, and Trent Lott also were warning against an invasion of Iraq. Something had to be done.
The disinformation campaign was launched by the WHIG and others inside and outside the White House. (We ordinary citizens learned about Bush's pre-9/11 obsession about attacking Iraq both from memoirs by former Cabinet members, such as Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and National Security Council official Richard Clarke, and most recently verified by the Downing Street Memos leaked from inside the Blair Cabinet.)
REASONS BEHIND THE INVASION
Bush&Co. realized they couldn't come right out and tell everyone what their true motives were -- to depose the Saddam Hussein regime in order to control the world's second largest oil reserve, to set up permanent military bases there, and to use the presence of those bases and the "shock&awe" example of overthrowing a dictator as a warning to other autocratic regimes in the Greater Middle East to bow to U.S. wishes. Those wishes involved oil, Israel, nuclear reactors, terrorism, and the like. So, a convenient reason -- one simple enough for the masses to comprehend -- had to be found that would justify war.
As the Downing Street Memos and other internal British and U.S. documents make clear, it was well-known that Iraq by the mid-1990s was a paper tiger: Its economy, as a result of the embargo, was in tatters; Saddam had control only of the central part of the country (Britain and the U.S. controlled the skies over the so-called "no-fly" zones in the South and the North); its standing army was easily defeatable; and, most important, its major weapons systems and research facilities had been effectively destroyed during the first Gulf War or in the years immediately after. In short, there were no WMD worth mentioning, even though the lying, exaggerating Iraqi exiles kept insisting that the U.S. military would find huge stockpiles of such when they got to Iraq.
But, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz later said, the Administration settled on WMD ("for bureaucratic reasons"), apparently realizing that it would be the most effective, frightening, and thus acceptable justification. And so the WMD scare campaign began, with nightmarish tales of biological and chemical agents (which senators were told could be delivered by a drone Iraqi air force over East Coast cities), huge missile armadas, and, most tellingly, nuclear weapons. Of course, none of this was true.
Cheney and Rice and Bush and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, the whole lot, spent months peddling their scare stories to the public and to members of Congress, and even sent poor Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations Security Council with a sorry, embarrassing hodge-podge of non-existent "evidence" -- and, damn, it worked.
Thanks to those lies and the stenography of the mainstream media when it came to the Administration's peddling of them, both the Congress and the public bought into Bushthink with regard to the war. That was especially so when the campaign added the laughable suggestion that somehow Saddam Hussein was tied to the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S. (yet another example of the Big Lie Technique used by Rove and his forces). The war was on.
THE WHITE HOUSE IRAQ GROUP
But someone, or some entity, within the Administration had to coordinate these concerted propaganda campaigns. That was the bailiwick and job-assignment of the WHIG, chaired by Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card, the regular members of which were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, along with "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's Chief of Staff. In other words, WHIG included the key decision makers (Rove, Rice, Card, Cheney-via Libby), and the key propaganda specialists (Hughes, Matalin, et al.).
They waited a month to launch their first public-relations bombardment. Why September? Andy Card let slip the reason in an interview with the New York Times: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," he said.
They soon determined that the public was most frightened of a possible nuclear attack by al-Qaida, and so, the day after publication of Card's marketing quote, the Bush Administration heavies began dropping their Iraq-as-nuclear-menace grenades into the public airwaves. They attempted to back up their claims by quoting from reports by international nuclear energy agencies supposedly saying that Iraq was about to become a nuclear power -- but no such reports existed.
But the lack of believable evidence about WMD didn't stop them, and the fright campaign continued. Some of that history may well have been in Fitzgerald's classified showing before the court.
FITZGERALD MIGHT HAVE TO WATCH OUT
In sum, the White House Iraq Group was tasked to come up with propaganda campaigns that would work on the Congress and American people -- no matter how great the fib; indeed, the bigger the lie, the easier it seemed to be to sell it. And their mission included coordinating those campaigns through the various stages, and denouncing and destroying the reputations of those who dared to confront their lies and deceptions.
The WHIG played the public like masters, thanks in no doubt to their stooges and ideological supporters in the mainstream media, who joined in the fool-the-public campaign in major, influential ways. Those who chose not to play the deception game, such as Ambassador Wilson, they decided, would be made to pay the price for their perfidy -- and would serve as a warning to any others inside the Administration who might want to blow some truth-whistles. Interestingly, the trash-Joe-Wilson campaign continues until this day.
To their chagrin, Wilson appears to be a man of great character and courage, and refuses to back down. And why should he? He's been speaking the truth about the Bush Administration's lack of evidence of Iraqi WMD for more than two years, while the Administration's lies have been exposed time and time again on the ground in Iraq and by official agencies and reports.
Again, it's not totally clear how far Special Counsel/U.S Attorney Fitzgerald is willing to go to clear out this nest of Administration vipers. He could choose to stick close to the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson case itself, or he could keep heading in the direction of indicting a good many Administration officials -- perhaps with Bush and Cheney as unindicted co-conspirators -- for their part in lying about classified national-security matters to the Congress and American people. A wild card: If Judith Miller were to trade immunity for prosecution and decide to testify about Rove/Libby/Cheney, anything could happen.
WOUNDED, CORNERED ANIMALS ARE DANGEROUS
If and when the above scenarios start to unfold, it's not outside the realm of possibility that Rove would get desperate enough to try to question the motives and character of the Special Counsel himself, as BuzzFlash puts it, "to try to sink the investigation through an ad hominem attack. This is Rove's pathological gutter tactic. He doesn't know how NOT to use it when backed into a corner." Or Rove/Bush conceivably could do a Nixon and order Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to fire Fitzgerald.
Anything is possible as the Bush Administration paints itself further into the scandal corner, and, desperate to avoid criminal proceedings and/or impeachment, lashes out at its perceived enemies.
Stay tuned. The fun is just beginning.
crisispapers.org |
