Judith Coburn on the Return of Watergate
tomdispatch.com
<<...The Politics of Impeachment and the One-Party State
Will Plamegate lead to the collapse of the Bush presidency or even impeachment? These are, in the end, matters less of legality than politics, consciousness, and conscience. A Republican-dominated Congress impeached President Bill Clinton for lying to a grand jury about sex with a White House intern, while President Bush remains free even from hearings, let alone legal action, on his administration's many Watergate-like excesses. Now that's politics!
What makes the Plame affair so odd, however, is this: Unlike Watergate or the Iran-Contra revelations, it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't know (or at least that we couldn't have known) before the Iraq War was launched. The neoconservatives' long-standing plans to invade Iraq, the administration's blanket policy of secrecy and the lies it told Congress and the public, the political manipulation of the intelligence community including the CIA, FBI, and the military -- all rivaling in scope any similar Nixonian schemes-- were in plain sight for those who cared to look during the run-up to the war. Even the Downing Street memo, the now infamous secret minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, describing the White House's commitment to invade Iraq at a time when it was telling Americans it had no plans to do so, had little, if anything, new in it. (At least, its exposure in the British press, like the latest reporting on Plame affair revelations, helped chip away at what had once been a well-armored administration.)
In fact, one of the most revelatory pieces of reporting on the whole pre- and post-invasion period could be found not in the American press but in an extraordinary three-part series in the leftist Italian newspaper La Repubblica, articles which have received only a few skeptical references buried in the back pages of our major papers (while being headline news in the on-line world of political websites and blogs). The Italian investigative reporters do tell us something new -- exactly how two of the key administration arguments for war in Iraq were concocted and known to be bogus by Italian intelligence and discredited by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and State Department officials until Vice President Cheney pounded CIA Director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell into submission.
According to La Repubblica, the yellowcake story and the forged documents that were its source were cooked up by a bottom-feeding double agent who needed the money. (He's Plamegate's most colorful character, rivaling G. Gordon Liddy, Watergate's handlebar-mustachioed, gun-loving CIA operative.) And Italian intelligence knew that the infamous aluminum tubes purchased by Saddam Hussein's regime were for rockets, not centrifuges in a nuclear-weapons program, because the Italian military had once equipped the Iraqis with that make of rocket.
High-level Italian spies are quoted in the piece as being well aware that they needed to hook up with the rogue Cheney/ Rumsfeld back-channel intelligence operation -- running counter to CIA analysis -- in order to keep their hand in with the White House. (Where is this era's James McCord, the Watergate burglar and CIA loyalist who told all because he feared the White House sought political control over the CIA?) Pre-war, the aluminum tubes were also roundly dismissed as evidence for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program by the UN's nuclear-weapons inspectors as well as recent Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ex-Ambassador Wilson was only the last in a long line to discredit Cheney's zealotry about Saddam's nonexistent nuclear program.
As for the Bush Administration's insistence that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, last week the Los Angeles Times, in a stunning exposé, documented how German intelligence had repeatedly warned the CIA that an Iraqi defector dubbed "Curveball," who was the sole source for these claims, was a con artist who cooked up his story to get a German visa. But the CIA went right ahead, funneling "Curveball's" phony info into Secretary of State Colin Powell's UN rush-to-war speech and other presidential and vice-presidential saber-rattlings.
Even the weak-kneed Senate Intelligence Committee has revealed how analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA among others, discredited the administration's assertions that al-Qaeda operatives were in league with the Iraqis and gave the infamous Chalabi network of defectors (the main source for Judy Miller's "scoops") zero marks for credibility.
It's often forgotten how long it took for Watergate to get traction as a political juggernaut. The initial Washington Post reports by Woodward and Bernstein on the Watergate burglary were printed before the 1972 election and yet Nixon was reelected. (The two reporters had not then traced Liddy, McCord, and the other Nixon "plumbers" back to the Committee to Reelect the President and the White House). Three decades later, much more was known about the Bush administration's excesses before the 2004 election. But times are very different. The young investigative reporter of Watergate morphed over those three decades into insider icon Bob Woodward, the "stenographer for the White House" who managed not to report on, no less mention to his editors, his all-too-close relationship to the Plame affair, while publicly disparaging its importance.
In the early seventies, however skeptical Americans were about Washington after more than eight years of the war in Vietnam under both Democratic and Republican war-makers, some hope of political change still smoldered. Cold War paranoia was ebbing, the horrors of 9/11 yet unimagined. Government was still a bipartisan concept; corporate money had yet to completely dominate elections; the media was still diverse, independent of the Republican attack machine, and skeptical of the powers-that-be. It was still imaginable that classic American checks and balances might right the ship of state.
Now, when the President waves the 9/ll voodoo doll, Congress, the media, and the public flinch. With both houses of Congress under Republican domination and both parties beholden to corporate America but not voting citizens, there have been no Watergate-style hearings, no impeachment hearings, no public investigations at all of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture and secret prisons, war profiteering, or the lies told in the rush to war. The Supreme Court is controlled by conservatives unblinkingly willing to put into the presidency a man whose party may well have stolen elections in Florida and Ohio.
We have no Sen. Sam Ervin, the avuncular constitutionalist and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee whose Watergate hearings educated Americans about the uses and abuses of government; no Rep. Peter Rodino, who ably and calmly chaired the House impeachment inquiry; not even a Republican like Sen. Howard Baker, who began by defending the White House and came to understand during the Watergate hearings that loyalty to country was more important than the survival of a corrupt president. Congressional critics have no forum like the Watergate hearings and are dependent on the jaded Beltway media to get the word out. But in recent weeks, moderate Republicans and John McCain, one of the few politicians still willing to fight for those quaint, old-fashioned things called "principles," are gaining traction. And liberal Democrats have new allies in the antiwar fight, most notably conservative Vietnam veteran Rep. John P. Murtha, who recently leapt over gutless wonders like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton to demand the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
White House attempts to tar critics with treason have met their match in retired colonel Murtha who sarcastically said he "liked guys who got five deferments and [have] never been there and send people to war and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done." (During Vietnam, Vice President Cheney received five deferments and never served in the military.)
We now have something close to one-party government in this country, an idea still so fantastic to Americans and their media that the most serious, in depth, and credible exploration of the 2000 and 2004 election fraud by any journalist -- the book Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America -- has been done by an Englishman, Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent. He's now been joined by American professor Mark Crispin Miller, whose new book Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections and Why They May Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) digs into the subject as well.
And instead of the Woodward/Bernstein team, we have Judy Miller (and the reborn Bob Woodward). Only a tiny handful of reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times (all with sinking circulations), 60 Minutes and almost uniquely the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh have been doing the kind of serious, in-depth investigative journalism that was done by many in the Watergate era. On-line reporters, able to circulate a single story at lightening speed around the world, are fueled by the same obsessive zeal as their age of Watergate print compatriots but have radically less money to support investigations of any sort. As Carl Bernstein pointed out recently in Vanity Fair, the Bush administration, like Nixon's, has succeeded only too well "in making the conduct of the press the issue -- again in wartime with false claims and smears directed at political opponents, reporters, newspapers, magazines and broadcast organizations for supposedly undermining national security." If only the media of our era had actually justified such attacks.
John Dean was indeed right. The Bush Administration's excesses are "worse than Watergate," in part because the power that has congealed in presidential hands is much greater than Nixon's imperial presidency held in the early 1970s. As a result, its zealotry, secrecy, deceit, and abuses of power are more akin to the secret bombing of Cambodia or the Iran-Contra affair -- scandals which did not unseat presidents -- than Watergate itself. In both the bombing of Cambodia and Iran-Contragate, a power-hungry White House kept secret foreign policies that it knew neither Congress, the courts, nor the public would be likely to approve -- even though Americans have traditionally been only too eager to give the White House a blank check on national security. No one was indicted for the secret bombing of Cambodia. In Iran-Contragate, eleven top administration officials, including two national security advisers and an undersecretary of state were finally convicted, but the first President George Bush rushed to pardon four of them as well as Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (even before he could be indicted). The specter of this resolution of the Libby case recently prompted Democrats and then a group of CIA officials -- to little media attention -- to write the President demanding that he go on record indicating there will be no pardons in the Plame affair. They received no reply...>> |
