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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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March 19th,
2007 - Valerie Plame, the Washington Post and the Ghost of Joe McCarthy |
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Valerie Plame, the
Washington Post and the Ghost of Joe McCarthy Plame Wars By Werther Counterpunch March 19, 2007 We will not recapitulate the
testimony of Valerie Plame Wilson before the House Committee on Oversight and
Government Reform, as it has already received media coverage commensurate
with a major story. The conclusion the press jumped on - that Ms. Plame was
in fact a covert employee of the Central Intelligence Agency - was as
anticlimactic as a headline announcing that Copernican Theory had been proven
correct. The story is childishly
simple: the CIA referred a complaint to the Justice Department predicated on
Ms. Plame's secret status three and one half years ago. The rationale for I.
Lewis Libby's, Karl Rove's, and Ari Fleischer's frantic bobbing and weaving
before a grand jury was grounded precisely in their collective endeavors to
avoid culpability for revealing her identity. Libby fell into a classic
perjury trap just to avoid implicating himself. These facts were blazingly
self-evident to anyone who didn't have a vested interest in maintaining the
falsehood that she was not a covert agent; unfortunately, the entire
executive branch, half the legislative branch, the totality of the Right Wing
noise machine, and even significant portions of the so-called respectable
press (as we shall see) had self-serving reasons to maintain the fictitious
assertion that Ms. Plame was merely a non-covert "disgruntled
employee." Still, it was useful to see
the star witness attest to her covert status under oath, and to observe Rep.
Henry Waxman, the committee's chairman, introduce into evidence a memo from
the CIA Director, General Michael V. Hayden, affirming her covert status.
This latter piece of evidence rendered the rebuttal testimony by the
Republicans' witness, Victoria Toensing, almost painfully comical. [1] More interesting was the
statement of James Knodell, director of the White House security office, who
testified that the White House had neither undertaken an internal
investigation into the leak nor taken disciplinary action against the
leakers. Even if revealing a covert operative were not criminally punishable
under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (and it is), one would think
the leak would be of interest to this or any other administration and would
lead to administrative sanctions or firing of the leaker - particularly after
the President himself publicly stated his intention to fire the leaker or
leakers. Mr. Knodell's testimony lays
bare, for possibly the five hundredth time, the spectacular bad faith of a
governing cabal whose recourse to lying is as natural as breathing. It also
uncovers consciousness of guilt on the part of senior White House officials
back in 2003, inasmuch as they had no desire to launch an investigation they
had every reason to believe would implicate one of their own. Much better to
maintain the fraudulent pretense that they were conducting an investigation,
and meanwhile, prime their allies in the noise machine with talking points to
the effect that Ms. Plame was not covert, and that her husband's motives were
suspect. These administration operatives tried to run out the clock, hoping
the public's interest in the matter would wane, and that Libby and Company
could escape Patrick Fitzgerald's perjury net. Much of the media faithfully
reported this Mr. Knodell's testimony, but not our favorite journalistic
specimen, the Washington Post. Its 17 March front-page story concentrated on
Ms. Plame's assertions, and oddly for a paper that obsesses over White House
processes, omitted Mr. Knodell's remarks. Why this is significant will become
evident later. The most explosive
testimony, and the least reported, was that elicited separately of Ms. Plame
by Rep. Steven F. Lynch (D-MA) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD). She stated
that she wrote an innocent e-mail to her superiors stating that she would
talk to her husband about going to Niger after administration and CIA
officials had already decided to pick him for the mission to discover whether
there was a substantive link between that country and the government of
Saddam Hussein. Presumably they asked her to ask him, and she wrote a record
of it to cover herself. Subsequently, she testified, the Senate Intelligence
Committee redacted the e-mail to make it appear as if she had originated the
request for her husband to go to Niger. Likewise, she testified that
the Senate Intelligence Committee staff had interviewed a CIA security
officer about her covert status. The Committee subsequently reported the
allegation (widely trumpeted by the noise machine) that Ms. Plame was not
covert. But she added that later, the security officer was "virtually in
tears" about the fact that the committee had twisted his statements. He
wanted to be re-interviewed, something the committee did not grant him. Deliberate falsification of
evidence for a Congressional finding about intelligence matters is news, one
would think. Yet the Post, with its finger on the pulse of every government
agency, particularly the CIA, [2] did not deign to publish this charge made
before a committee of Congress and under oath. Why? Stuffy institutions like the
Post are notoriously slow to admit they ever made a mistake. In this case,
the "mistake" is an occasional series of unsigned editorials dating
back two years, stating with stentorian authority that Ms. Plame was not
covert, and therefore no crime was committed. The editorials also launched
into some gratuitous personal attacks on Joseph Wilson, her husband. [3] Now
that Ms. Plame's status has been attested to under oath, and buttressed by
the CIA Director himself, one would think an apology would be in order -
doubly so in so far as the "evidence" on which the Post editorial
board rested its case has also been stated to have been manipulated. But
there is no apology from the Post, just as there is no reporting of the
testimony about the Senate Intelligence Committee's apparent manipulation of
evidence. Again, why? Meet Fred Hiatt, editorial
page editor of the Post. While lesser known than some other Post panjandrums
like Bob Woodward, he is responsible for the editorial line against the
Wilsons. He was also influential in the paper's hysterical pro-war
cheerleading during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. And he continues,
long after they have been discredited as bloodthirsty and dishonest
charlatans, to give inordinate space on the op-ed page to the Kristols,
Kagans, Feiths, and similar intellectual flyweights. Beyond Mr. Hiatt, the Post
might have other reasons to feel compromised about the Libby trial, the Plame
testimony, and, indeed, the entire complex of issues connected with the
reasons for attacking Iraq. There may be at least three reasons the Post has
been dead silent about the Senate Intelligence Committee's manipulation, and
disingenuous about Libby's crime: 1. Mr. Hiatt could be a more
significant figure than hitherto suspected. While Judith Miller has garnered
notoriety as a cheerleader for war and a fabricator of the casus belli, there
may be other establishment media outlets that harbor exactly similar figures.
There are grounds to believe Mr. Hiatt's relationship to the administration
may be as comprising as Ms. Miller's was. 2. Could the Post's soft
editorial line on the Libby/Plame affair have been dictated by the paper's
cultivation of sources within the administration, and a consequent reluctance
to burn them or make them angry by adverse reporting or editorials, or even
worse, an exposé that might put them in legal jeopardy? The fact that Bob
Woodward continued to report, in trademark idiot savant fashion, about the
Libby/Plame case while not revealing he was a material witness in the case,
is revealing. 3. Does the Post have so
much invested in columnist Robert Novak that it must continue letting him
muddy the waters with feeble vindications of himself (and sliming everyone on
the other side)? Not content with outing a covert operative in time of war,
Mr. Novak subsequently blew the cover of CIA front company Brewster-Jennings
& Associates, thereby increasing the damage to covert sources. A
"responsible" Establishment paper (which is what the Post fancies
itself) would not publish in advance the time and date of a U.S. military
operation. One would think it would consider dropping a columnist who recklessly
exposed a U.S. citizen in a sensitive government job, rather than allowing
him to continue to publish self-serving vindications which only served to
further compromise covert networks. None of these explanations
about the Post's motives, if true, excludes the others. And there may be
additional reasons as well. While much of the
"respectable" press simply ignored the bombshell of Ms. Plame's
statement suggesting the Senate Intelligence Committee's report was cooked,
the noise machine duly took note of the import - and proceeded to fabricate
hypotheses that would fit their fantasy version of reality. Fox
"News" operative Brit Hume promptly concocted the hallucination
that Ms. Plame lied under oath, because she had contradicted the findings of
the "bipartisan" Committee. [4] We shall see how bipartisan that
committee was. Beyond the rot festering in
the press, a press which is supposed to keep the citizenry informed, lies a
decay at the heart of the very concept of self government and separation of
powers. There was always something fishy about the Senate Intelligence
Committee's breathless finding that no pressure had been placed on
intelligence analysts by administration officials to skew the intelligence
about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Just as it was fishy that the
report miraculously exonerated the political appointees of manipulating
intelligence, while at the same time blaming the intelligence professionals
for "bad product." The subsequent statements of
multiple witnesses, since retired, who worked at the relevant agencies during
the run-up to war, like Tyler Drumheller, Karen Kwiatkowski, Larry Wilkerson,
Flynt Leverett, and others, have already definitively refuted the Senate
Intelligence Committee's claims. The assertion by the then-chairman of the
committee, the wisecracking, aw-shucks Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), that the
panel would conduct a follow-up report into the mystery of the non-existent
WMD before the 2004 election, never materialized. Nor did it materialize
before the 2006 election, despite the timid request of the ranking committee
member, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA). Let us be clear: what we see
is an apparent case of Congress using its oversight power to collude with the
executive branch to discredit a U.S. citizen for political motives, while at
the same time covering up lawbreaking by other parties. If congressional
findings about the quality of intelligence leading to war were manipulated,
is there any investigative finding over the past six years that can be
trusted? When the legislative branch aligns itself with an all-powerful
executive branch in the manner of a compliant Reichstag in order to implicate
the innocent and exonerate the guilty, democratic self-rule is no longer
safe. In the early 1950s, there
were indubitably Communist agents infiltrating the U.S. government. But did
Sen. Joseph McCarthy find the Rosenbergs, or David Greenglass, or Kim Philby?
No, he conducted his kangaroo courts against mousy little civil servants
guilty of no more than unorthodox opinions, or Hollywood actors (admittedly
an easy target, but harmless egomaniacs), or against General George Catlett
Marshall, the architect of U.S. strategy in World War II. McCarthy was like a
reverse divining rod: he put numerous people through hell and ruined them
financially, but he did not find a single Red agent. Not one. [4] McCarthy's rants were the
gin-fueled outpourings of a publicity seeker whose activities had a wide
degree of resonance among a newly paranoid public, terrified of the atomic
bomb. He was eventually opposed by an administration of his own party,
formally censured by the Senate, and utterly discredited. When McCarthy dared
to question General Marshall's loyalty, he ran into a buzz-saw named Ike. The
current situation is more difficult. Sen. Roberts is no McCarthy,
a mere grandstander; he is an assiduous and careful colluder with an
administration actively attempting to discredit its political opponents while
evading the law. He has also gained currency as what Washingtonian magazine
calls "the funniest Senator". Presumably that magazine selected
only among senators who were intentionally funny, or the contest would have
been a 15-way dead heat; there are some people, however, who fail to see the
humor of a sworn elected official involved in an attempt to prejudice the
public against a perjury and obstruction of justice case arising from damage
to the U.S. national security. When the night watchman actively conspires
with the burglar, there is a problem. [5] With the opposition party
being as cowardly and as compromised as the Democrats, we can expect no real
action. But Ms. Plame's assertion under oath is serious enough that the
Senate Ethics Committee is justified in opening an investigation as to
whether the former Intelligence Committee chairman is culpable of unethical
behavior by misusing the congressional investigative process to hide
wrongdoing and damage the reputations of the innocent. If he is so found, the
available sanctions, in ascending order of seriousness, are reprimand,
censure, or expulsion. Werther is the pen name of a
Northern Virginia-based defense analyst. [1] We have previously
described Ms. Toensing's defective legal understanding, but until last Friday's
hearing, we had never laid eyes on her. Her Coulter-esque eye-rolling, manic
grimacing, and overblown gesticulation invite disinterested research into a
new phenomenon. Back in the 1970s, women who worked out their neuroses by
becoming bossy and disagreeable political harridans could generally be
located on the leftward end of the political spectrum, cf., Bella Abzug. Now
they seem to congregate on the Right: La Coulter herself, Michelle Malkin,
Katherine Harris, Jeanne Schmidt. Tracing the parabola of this migration
would reveal a lot about American society. [2] Owing to the longtime
relationship between the Agency and Post doyenne, the late Katherine Meyer
Graham, as well as the paper's star journalist Bob Woodward's suspected
professional links to the intelligence world, the Post has long been known as
"the CIA paper," just as the Unification Church's Washington Times
is "the KCIA paper." [3] An egregious example of
the Post's malfeasance can be seen in its 7 March 2006 editorial on the Libby
trial: "The Libby Verdict, The serious consequences of a pointless
Washington scandal." The editorial's attempt to slime and discredit Mr.
Wilson in precisely the manner of the administration, while maintaining its
Establishment facade of plague-on-both-your-houses nonpartisanship, is a
museum-quality example of mainstream journalism at its worst. [4] "Hume Launches New
Smear: Plame Lied Under Oath." [5] S. Prt. 107-84 -
Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of
the Committee on Government Operations (McCarthy Hearings 1953-54) Index to
Hearings TEXT 74K PDF 245K; Volume 1 TEXT 5.1M PDF 2.4M; Volume 2 TEXT 2.3M
PDF 2.2M; Volume 3 TEXT 2.4M PDF 2.2M; Volume 4 TEXT 2.3M PDF 2.2M; Volume 5
TEXT 1.5M PDF 1.5M. External link: http://www.counterpunch.org/werther03192007.html |