The Plame Case Ain't What You Think
Thu Jun 30, 2005 at 09:35:30 AM PDT
Liberal Oasis has a piece up on the Plame case and Miller and Cooper. It reflects the common wisdom about what is going on, ie that someone in the administration leaked Plame's name to punish Joe Wilson for questioning the administration's story on WMD. While many liberals have embraced this story I strongly suspect it is completely mistaken, a confabulation of administration revisionism and Joe Wilson's ego. The real story is a bit more interesting and explains why leaking Plame's name probably isn't a crime and why some folks in the administration may be in legal trouble anyway, and why Cooper and Miller's testimony is so important. Hint: its about the Downing Street Memos
Here is how Liberal Oasis characterizes the Plame leak:
It was the act of a White House official trying to punish a whistleblower (Plame's husband Joe Wilson, who challenged Bush's truthfulness in accusing Saddam of trying to obtain nuclear material), and in turn, intimidate potential whistleblowers.
certainly this is the story that Wilson has been telling. I'm not sure whether he believes it or thinks it is the best spin to get media coverage, but I'm pretty sure it is wrong and has confused most people about the real story.
To understand that you need to get past Wilson's ego and realize that he is a bit player in this drama, and his wife Valerie Plame has a leading role. We just never see her on screen.
All the attention has focused on Plame as victim, the CIA operative whose safety has been threatened and career compromised by being "outed" But most folks ignore her then current role, as analyst at the CIA WMD desk. Now the current revised history from the Bush folks is that the CIA is responsible for overstating Saddam's WMD capabilities. But we know better. To understand this case you need to recall the political and intelligence context of the period just before and after the start of the war.
As confirmed by the Downing Street Memos, Bush was determined to take out Saddam, and the administration was "fixing" the intelligence to provide a justification. Unfortunately the CIA wasn't helping very much. While "everyone" "knew" that Saddam had WMD, the actual intelligence we had was really poor. Experts were sure that the evidence we ended up seeing like the aluminum "centrifuge tubes" for uranium enrichment, the Niger documents and the mobile biological labs were bogus, and the CIA didn't trust the human intelligence from Chalabi's gang of informers.
Since the CIA was shooting down reasons for war as fast as Chalabi could make them up, the Bushies (paticularly Cheney and Rumsfeld) set up the Office of Special Plans at DOD to "stovepipe" the good stuff and package it for public and international consumption. There were reports of "war" within the intelligence community between the CIA regulars and the prowar DOD. Plame was a top CIA WMD analyst. She was one of the generals on the other side.
Now the timing of the Plame leak is important. When he War began in March even skeptics expected Iraq had some WMD stockpiles. While there was some surprise that none were used, we saw throughout the fighting reports about potential exposure. When Bush declared Mission Accomplished on May 1 the official line was still that we expected to find large caches which were hidden before the war. The administration was counting on those discoveries to justify their manipulation of intelligence before the war.
Wilson's story started to reach the public in early June when it was reported that the CIA had a negative report on the now discredited Niger memos a year earlier. It blew up in early July when Wilson went public, and Novak published his column outing Plame on July 14 - Mission to Niger
At the time the administration was flush with success and still confident that they would find illegal weapons. They were sorting Washington into good guys (who supported the war) and bad guys (who questioned it). When Wilson came up they asked around "Who is this guy" and learned he was married to a CIA WMD analyst. That made him a bad guy, so they share the news with Novak, as a way of discrediting Wilson. It wasn't about retaliation, it was about tarnishing Wilson by tying him to the antiwar faction at CIA. The White House knows Plame as an analyst who refused to support their prowar view. They have been fighting these internal battles for months; now that they have won the war those Saddam lovers are out. I doubt anyone even thought about her being covert.
To get a flavor of where the White House was going see this WSJ editorial from October
'Stupid' Intelligence
Some of our spooks simply oppose Bush administration antiterror policy.
Friday, October 3, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
If there's a silver lining to the controversy surrounding the Valerie Plame "outing," it's that an increasingly poisonous dispute over counterterrorism policy has been outed along with her. We're talking about the disagreement between the Bush Administration and many of the career intelligence officials at the State Department and the CIA.
Josh Marshall
noted at the time that the White House was climbing out on a limb that had already been cut off.
Take a look at the lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal today.
I'd summarize their argument as follows … "Fine, maybe this leak did occur. But let's not let these small points obscure the big point: the war between the White House and the CIA. Once the public sees that battle for what it is, they'll side with President Bush."
In part, I agree: the war between the White House and the CIA is the big story. It's the feud from which this law-breaking springs.
But pushing this story out to this larger policy battle isn't going make things any better for them, only worse. Because they've already lost that battle. They just don't realize it yet.
There's a cartoon from years ago --- I think from the New Yorker, but perhaps from somewhere else --- in which there's a guy sitting at his desk and he's just had his head sliced off. Only the slice came so fast and clean that his head is still sitting there on the stump of his neck. He's thinking everything's fine. He'll only find out there's a problem the first time he tries to move.
That's where these folks are right now.
Fast forward a year and things have changed. The War isn't looking like a slam dunk political winner, no WMD have been found, and folks are pointing fingers about how we could have been so wrong. The last thing in the world the Bushies want is an examination of the intelligence war between CIA and DOD. No indeed turns out it was actually CIA all along that was pushing the WMD story and the White House only doing what they thought they must in response to the flawed intelligence.
So when Patrick Fitzgerald shows up to investigate the outing of a CIA operative, the White House folks have a problem. They can hardly explain that they inadvertently outed an agent because they wanted to link Wilson to a faction at CIA that thought there were no WMD because, well, that would mean the White House had manufactured intelligence to take us into an unnecessary and increasingly unpopular war. After all they were now blaming CIA for OVERstating the threat from Iraq's WMD.
What did they tell Fitzgerald's investigators? What was their Grand Jury testimony. Bet it was pretty hard to come up with a consistent story that wasn't a political disaster. How many lied?
What started as a potential case of intentionally leaking the identity of an agent has now become about perjury and obstruction of justice in an attempt to conceal White House involvement in fixing the intelligence that led to war. Cooper and Miller were all over the prewar intelligence beat, so they become keys to understanding how the White House went from propagandists fighting CIA skeptics over WMD to triumphal victors haranguing their doubtors to well meaning victims of bad intelligence. The Plame disclosure happened right in the middle of the transformation, which means that it draws attention to both the WH role in the fixing of intelligence and its efforts to deny that role.
Fitzgerald needs the reporters to contradict whatever whitewash the WH has come up with for this mess. Its not just the identity of the source, it is what the WH was saying and when that will show that they lied to Fitzgerald and the Grand Jury to cover up their manipulation of and lying about prewar intelligence. This is what happens when the administration's Orwellian alteration of history occurs in a venue where lying is a crime and providing talking points is conspiracy to obstruct justice.
