Issues & Insights
Myths To A Plame: The Case Against Rove
Investors Business Daily
Posted 10/19/2005
Politics: As special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's mandate expires, Karl Rove's only crime may be not that he "outed" Valerie Plame as a CIA operative but that he exposed her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, as a liar.
The case involving Rove and who "leaked" Plame's "secret" identity as a CIA employee to the press is so convoluted that it's easy to forget the whole thing began with President Bush uttering 16 words in a 5,400-word State of the Union: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
It was these 16 words that Wilson spent eight days in Niger investigating on behalf of the CIA, "drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people," as he put it, afterward writing an op-ed piece in The New York Times essentially claiming the Bush administration sent U.S. soldiers to Iraq to die for a lie.
Wilson, who later was a foreign affairs adviser to the Kerry campaign, turned out to be a physician in need of healing himself when it comes to truth-telling, as revealed on July 9, 2004. That was when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its report on the CIA's prewar intelligence on Iraq.
The report concluded that Wilson lied when he denied his wife got him the Niger assignment. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," he wrote in his book, adding, "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."
But according to the Senate report: "Interviews and documents provided to the committee indicate his wife . . . suggested his name for the trip." This included a memo Plame herself sent to the CIA.
The report also said Wilson lied when he told The Washington Post he knew the Niger intelligence had been based on forged documents. The CIA didn't obtain the document said to be a forgery until a full eight months after Wilson's return from Niger.
Wilson told the public Niger had denied the uranium connection. But the Senate found that Wilson's own report said that the Niger government had confirmed that Iraq had tried to buy uranium.
So when Rove, in an e-mail sent to Time magazine's Matt Cooper in July 2003, said Wilson's trip to Niger for the CIA was arranged by "Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency," without providing her actual name, he was not exposing Plame as an agent.
He was exposing her husband as a prevaricator, in effect warning Cooper and others not to take his claims seriously.
While Wilson was found to have lied repeatedly, an independent British investigative committee on WMD intelligence headed by Lord Butler in its report (butlerreview.org.uk ) found "the intelligence was credible" and Bush's statement was "well-founded."
Rove is said to have blown a CIA operative's cover. But didn't Wilson, who was hired as a consultant by the CIA, and presumably signed the routine CIA confidentiality agreement, blow his own cover by afterwards writing an op-ed piece in The New York Times?
Plame's name was certainly no secret, appearing in Wilson's "Who's Who In America" entry. Nor were her political affiliations and those of her husband. It could be argued that Mrs. Wilson blew her own cover when she made a contribution to the Al Gore for President campaign and listed her CIA cover company as her employer in the FEC filing.
The 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which Rove is accused of violating, was designed to protect the CIA from subversion and treason by those who wished harm upon the agency and the United States. It wasn't designed to protect the identities of desk jockeys and their spouses who willingly inject themselves into a national political debate.
If Karl Rove is a criminal, exactly what was the crime?
There is no crime, according to attorney Victoria Toensing, who drafted the legislation in her role as chief counsel for the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. She says that under the statute the "outed" agent must have operated outside the U.S. within the previous five years, and Plame had given up her role as a covert agent in favor of a desk job in Langley, Va., nine years before the Rove interview, according to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
The usual suspects who got even with Newt Gingrich for electing a Republican Congress, and who are pursuing Tom DeLay for pushing the Republican agenda, are now trying to settle the score with the man who got George W. Bush elected twice.
As we've noted, this isn't the first time an attempt has been made to criminalize political differences or to get even with GOP gurus for their political prowess and success. It is somewhat disheartening to see the administration Rove has served so well not mount a passionate defense of this innocent man, saying merely that anyone found guilty of leaking a CIA agent's name would be fired.
This is an attempt to use — or rather, misuse — the law to achieve what Democrats could not at the polls: the neutering of the Republican revolution. As columnist Ann Coulter points out, the only person to have demonstrably lied and possibly broken the law is Joseph Wilson. We can only hope it will not succeed. |
