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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (44767)	10/7/2003 4:29:45 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

From a Parallel Universe... I was going to write about William Safire this morning, but I never got his column. Instead, the internet burped up a William Safire column from an alternative universe--one in which George W. Bush is a Democrat. So I can't write about William Safire: Who's Shallow Throat?: NYTimes.com > Opinion \| By WILLIAM SATIRE Published: October 6, 2003 WASHINGTON — To dig into the whodunit roiling the capital, we need a glossary: leak, plain and simple, is the unauthorized passage of information from a source, an official in the know, to a media plantee. It can be deliberate or inadvertent. leaker who is admired for putting his notion of the public interest ahead of his official obligation or oath is called a whistle-blower; the same individual, viewed from inside, is called a fink, and is pursued vainly by plumbers. authorized leak is information passed on to a selected outlet with high-level approval by a designated persuader called a spinmeister. counterleak (now we're getting sophisticated) is an anonymous source's passing of a charge of someone else's leaking to a reporter, who sees a conspiracy in the exposure of the original, possibly authorized, leak. Now to the spookspeak, or intelligence-agency jargon: A noc, pronounced "knock," is a C.I.A. acronym for "non-official cover" — that is, an informant or agent operating without the diplomatic protection, or cover, of employment by the U.S. government. Ready? In July of this year, Robert Novak, an over-the-hill columnist who has a partisan heart in the right place asked somebody why in the world the White House was upset that the CIA had dispatched an investigator to Africa to check out allegations about Iraqi uranium negotiation who had been highly praised and respected by presidents of both parties. The columnist reported he was told by "two senior administration officials" that the investigator, Joseph Wilson IV -- who had just surfaced as an on-the-record whistle-blower, blasting the administrations lies in The New York Times and on NBC's "Meet the Press" -- had been recommended by his wife, who works for the CIA. Robert Novak -- who is not as fast a thinker as he once was -- somehow did not understand why or did not remember that his sources at the CIA pleaded with him not to use the story, and let the two White House aides use him to expose the cover of a covert CIA network engaged in hunting for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Nobody warned Novak that Wilson's wife was or had been a "noc." The two White House aides did not. They are now claiming two different things through different sets of leaks. First, they are claiming that they did not know she had been a "noc" either--a statement which does not diminish their moral responsibility while magnifying the evidence of their incompetence. Second, they are claiming that they didn't want Novak to use the story, just to remember that Wilson's assignment had a nepotistic origin. The CIA referred the leak to the Justice Department, because officials are prohibited from intentionally identifying a "noc." This is the first time in history that such a noc-leak investigation has been aimed at the White House staff. An FBI inquiry proceeded quietly for two months, during which the entire senior White House staff knew that they had in their midst people who had blown the cover of a confidential CIA network--and did nothing. To them, and to the president, committing felonies and harming the CIA's ability to conduct its operations is no big deal. Then, after the honorable intelligence professionals had had it up to here, a counterleaker struck. The story had a sensational angle: "A senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife." The incendiary charge by an unnamed official was that two administration spinmeisters had launched a campaign to intimidate a critic by endangering his wife and destroying the usefulness of the overseas intelligence networks she had been a part of. Enter "Shallow Throat," a high administration mole, probably in the CIA. But the White House staff is laughing at us. The fix is presumably in at the Justice Department: the Attorney General is, after all, a long-time client of the chief suspect. Leak hunts in official Washington rarely go anywhere. This, too, will probably stall out. That is why it is important to hold tight to what this tells us about the immorality that is at the core of the White House: neither the White House staff, nor the president, cares about protecting the identity, preserving the usefulness, and ensuring the safety of those who fight for us in the looking-glass war. It goes without saying that a president and a White House staff who thought like patriotic Americans would think very differently. It goes without saying that things would be very different if we had a Republican in the White House. Posted by DeLong at 08:00 AM \| Permanent Link \| Comments (25)