Man Who Outed CIA Operative

Deserves Prize for ‘Truth-Telling’,

Says The Wall Street Journal

By M.P. Prabhakaran

            Ever since it became evident that one of the sources that leaked the identity of an undercover Central Intelligence Agency operative was Karl Rove, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and President Bush’s close confidant and chief adviser, the paleocons and neocons in the Republican Party and the right-wing media in the country have been working hard to portray him as a truth-teller, not a criminal. The Wall Street Journal goes a step further and recommends rewarding him for what he did. This is what the paper says in “Karl Rove, Whistleblower,” its lead editorial on July 13, 2005:

            “Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove’s head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we would say the White House political guru deserves a prize – perhaps the next iteration of the ‘Truth-Telling’ award that The Nation [italics added] magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.”

            That is, according to The Journal, what Mr. Rove did should be viewed as an expose of CIA nepotism, not as a case of outing a covert intelligence operative. The latter is a crime under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. What is the CIA nepotism the paper is talking about? Let’s see whether we can find the answer.

            Joseph C. Wilson IV was U.S. Ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995 and, before that, the country’s Charge d’Affaires in Iraq. His credentials as a diplomat were such that, during the 1991 Iraq war, he received plaudits for his work from no less a person than George H.W. Bush, the present President’s father, who was President at the time.

            In February 2002, at the CIA’s request, Wilson traveled to Niger. His mission was to investigate the claim made in some circles that Iraq had been trying to purchase uranium from Niger. The CIA made the request only after Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and the State and Defense Departments expressed an interest in finding out whether the claim was true. If true, it would further bolster the case the President, the Vice President and many in the Bush administration had been building for a war with Iraq. As we all know, among the reasons given for going to war was that Iraq either had or was trying to build nuclear weapons.

            As Wilson stated in his Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, on July 6, 2003 (more about the Op-Ed piece, in a minute), after spending eight days in Niger, meeting with “people associated with the country’s uranium business,” Wilson concluded that “it was highly doubtful that any such transaction [relating to uranium purchase by Iraq] had ever taken place.” Moreover, Niger had denied the charges from the very beginning. In his Times piece, Wilson had also alluded to the original source of the uranium purchase claim being forged documents, a fact that has since been confirmed.

            In spite of his findings or the lack thereof in Niger, President Bush repeated the uranium purchase canard in his State of the Union speech, on January 28, 2003: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Bush made this claim in total disregard for Wilson’s “detailed briefing to the CIA,” in as early as March 2002. As is well-known by now, the Bushies, bent on going to war with Iraq, were in the habit of brushing aside any intelligence that didn’t support their war plan. Some who were part of the decision-making group in the Administration at that time have since revealed that, from Day One in office, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the war-mongering coterie around them had been looking for some excuse, any excuse, to invade Iraq.

            The war began on March 19, 2003. On May 1, 2003, standing on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, against the backdrop of a huge banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” Bush declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” In fact, when Bush made the declaration, major calamities in Iraq had only began. When death and destruction became a daily occurrence and the Administration kept repeating that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction would soon be found, Wilson decided to tell the world his side of the story. He did it through “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” Op-Ed article in The Times, on July 6, 2003.

“Twisted” Intelligence

            The one sentence in the article that jolted the Administration was this: “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” Bush and his ilk, Karl Rove counted first, took offense to the “twisted” intelligence charge in the article. They were also offended by the fact that the article exposed as a lie the assertion made by Bush in the now-infamous 16 words in his State of the Union address. They set in motion a vicious campaign to destroy Wilson’s credibility. The man who orchestrated the campaign was Karl Rove, a person known for employing dirty tricks to achieve his political and personal goals. Outing Wilson’s wife was deliberately done in the course of that campaign.

            At the time the outing took place she was an undercover CIA operative. It took place when syndicated columnist Robert Novak wrote in his July 14, 2003, column that “Two senior administration officials told me that his wife suggested sending Wilson to Niger to investigate” the uranium purchase allegations. That his wife suggested sending Wilson on the Niger mission is the basis for the CIA nepotism charge the right-wing media, especially The Wall Street Journal,  have been harping on. That she did it because of her husband’s expertise in the politics of Niger and the region surrounding it was totally ignored by them. Novak, by the way, has been a conduit for many a Republican leak.

            To get back to the infamous 16 words in the President’s State of the Union address: As admitted later, indirectly though, by three senior Bush advisers, those words caused considerable embarrassment to the Administration. This is what Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser at the time, said in an interview earlier this year about the 16 words: “I was the National Security Adviser and the President said something that probably shouldn’t have been in the speech, and it was as much my responsibility” as anyone else’s. News reports have it that Stephen P. Hadley, Ms. Rice’s deputy at the time, even offered to resign, saying that it was he, not Ms. Rice, who was responsible for it. Bush did not just ignore their concerns; he rewarded their loyalty. In his second term as President, he made Condoleezza Rice Secretary of State and gave her old job to Mr. Hadley. He is now the National Security Adviser.

            The third person who admitted indirect responsibility for the 16 words in the President’s speech was none other than George J. Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence at the time. Soon after the Wilson article appeared in The Times, he issued a statement saying that “These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President.” Maybe for indirectly taking the blame for the embarrassment or maybe to dissuade him from spilling more beans on the Administration’s lies about the Iraqi nuclear program, Tenet was honored last year with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

            Admission of mistakes by three close Bush advisers has not made The Wall Street Journal give up its belief in the “the Iraq-Niger yellowcake uranium connection.” Now that the paper knows that the concocted intelligence provided by the Bush Administration won't wash any longer, it decided to look elsewhere, across the Atlantic, for evidence in support of the connection. Says the July 13, 2005, editorial: “About the same time, another inquiry headed by Britain’s Lord Butler delivered its own verdict on the 16 words: ‘We conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 … was well-founded.’” A lie doesn’t become truth, The Journal may note, simply because it receives endorsement from a British Lord. Moreover, the Butler commission report has been dubbed by many as nothing more than a whitewash.

The Downing Street Memo

            One wishes that The Journal had quoted something from another British source, the by-now-famous “Downing Street Memo.” The document, prepared on July 23, 2002 for circulation among senior British cabinet members and marked “SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL – UK EYES ONLY,” among other things, says:

            “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”  (“The secret Downing Street memo,” The Sunday Times, London, May 1, 2005). 

            To undermine Mr. Wilson’s credibility, the July 13 editorial also quotes a sentence from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on intelligence failures, which has nothing to do with its main findings. What kind of logic does The Journal apply to draw the conclusion that, because “The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report last July cited the note that Ms. Plame had sent recommending her husband for the Niger mission,” the outcome of the mission is flawed? When it comes to conducting character assassinations campaigns against those whom it hates, The Journal throws logic to the wind. The paper may want to pay heed to what Frank Rich wrote in his column in The New York Times, on July 17, 2005:

            “The case is not about Joseph Wilson.… The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit – the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes – is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That’s why the stakes are so high; this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.”