I also want to speak to those of you who did not support my decision to send troops to Iraq: I have heard your disagreement, and I know how deeply it is felt. Yet now there are only two options before our country – victory or defeat. And the need for victory is larger than any president or political party, because the security of our people is in the balance. I do not expect you to support everything I do, but tonight I have a request: Do not give in to despair, and do not give up on this fight for freedom.
Somebody give Richard Cohen a cigarette. (Let’s hope he didn’t watch this speech in public.)
I have one question for the media. Why is everyone so impressed that Bush is taking responsibility for going into Iraq? Has there ever been any question about that? We know he made the decision. He has made a fetish of taking responsibility for doing it. indeed, we watched him do it in defiance of virtually the whole world and half the country. This is not an admission of a mistake.
Likewise, admitting that there were no WMD is like admitting that the sun came up this morning. It’s true, yes, but saying it is not “candor” — it’s stating the obvious.
Saying that the intelligence was wrong is not taking responsibility for getting it wrong. We know it was wrong.
These are cheap rhetorical tricks and they fall for it every single time. Some GOP hack hands them a sheet talking up the president’s newfound “candor” and they all gobble it up like hungry little baby birds.
The president says he is operating within the law because his appointed lawyers have interpreted the law to say that he has. He says that the US does not torture and he believes it. He believes it because his lawyers have told him that torture is defined as pain equal to that experienced by organ failure or death. Therefore, waterboarding, which only replicates the experience of drowning is not torture. Being shackled in unusual positions for long periods of time subject to extreme heat and cold likewise is not torture. One could argue that pulling someone’s fingernails out as is shown in the film “Syriana” is not torture.
Spying on Americans is likewise legal because the president’s lawyers have said that he has the authority under the constitution to spy on Americans during wartime. In fact, they have said the executive has the authority to do anything he feels is necessary during wartime, a war which he has sole authority to wage, a war which he alone defines and which has no set definition of victory.
You might think that this redefinition of what constitutes war applies only to the GWOT. But redefining war and victory also applies to the more conventional invasion and occupation of Iraq as well, which Bush also defines as a “different kind of war.”
Here’s how he put it in his interview with Jim Lehrer:
PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I think that this is a different kind of a war. I mean, in World War II we think of the USS Missouri and Japan– We surrender. However, if you think about World War II, there was still a mission to be accomplished, that Harry Truman saw through, which is to help an enemy become a democracy. We achieved a, by kicking Saddam Hussein out, you know, a milestone. But there’s still work to help this country develop its own democracy and there’s no question there’s difficulties because of the past history and the fact that he starved an infrastructure and the reconstruction efforts have been uneven.
But victory is, against a guy like Zarqawi, is bringing him to justice. Victory is denying safe haven to al-Qaida, and victory is marginalizing those who would destroy democracy.
He compares Iraq to WWII and even discusses the surrender on the USS Missouri, which everyone in the world accepted as the end of the war. When Harry Truman went on to “accomplish the rest of the mission,” he didn’t do it under the auspices of the country still being at war because it wasn’t. Bush has always liked this analogy, however, going back to his famous strut on another aircraft carrier when he declared “Mission Accomplished.” Unfortunately, his advisors forgot to tell him that in Germany there was no insurgency, although for months Condi and Rummy were spreading lies about the Werewolf “dead-enders” in Germany, so maybe that’s what they were telling him too.
In any case, the ridiculous WWII analogy should have been put on the shelf a long time ago. Yet Bush evidently continues to believes that he is saving the world from the existential threat of the Axis powers. And in his usual incoherent fashion, while seeing himself as Harry Truman he also says that “victory” in this war, which is a “different kinda war,” will be won when we bring a guy like Zarqawi to justice. Or deny a safe haven to al-Qaeda. Or “marginalize those who would destroy democracy.” Victory may even depend upon how the Iraqi people ‘feel.” In other words, we will have achieved victory when he says we have achieved victory.
Keep in mind that we are not talking about the Big Boogeyman, terrorism, here. We are talking about Iraq, a country in the middle east that we invaded and are occupying. We could just as easily be the Romans or the Turks or the British. There’s nothing “different” about it. But even in Iraq we don’t know what constitutes victory or defeat. Therefore, we could, theoretically, always be at war.
This is the most troubling aspect of the Yoo Doctrine. It is offensive enough that he contends that the president has completely unfettered powers during wartime. But the fact that he also believes that the president can “make war” at his discretion, define war in any way he chooses, consider “victory” to be any one or all of a thousand of unknown conditions that we may or may not be able to discern, is the truly unique factor here. And the fact that the administration is applying this vague definition of war and victory even to a conventional war like Iraq is very dangerous. It gives imperial powers forever to any president who simply says we are “at war.”
It’s probably important to draw some distinctions here between a legal theorist like John Yoo and Ted “Arkansas Project” Olsen, both of whom have promulgated this theory of unfettered executive power for years. In Yoo’s case I have no reason to believe that this is a purely political view; he is certainly a Republican, but his belief is philosophical and academic. I would be surprised if he would come out against these powers in the hands of a Democrat. (I could be wrong.) Ted Olsen, on the other hand, is nothing more than a cheap GOP operative who will change his tune on a dime when the presidency changes parties.
Events of the last couple of days show that for most of the Republican party this is purely a political game that they will support as long as the president is a Republican. (See: Kosovo) Judging from John McCain’s dodging of the question this morning, I assume that if he or any other Republican president will continue with this doctrine. He may not like torture, but he didn’t seem too troubled by spying on Americans — or the idea that the president has unfettered powers during wartime. (If anything, he looked a little bit excited by the prospect.)
There can be no doubt about where this is going. This administration has asserted a doctrine of unfettered executive power in “wartime” that will not confine itself to “suspected terrorists” as we understand them. Everything we know about human nature — and particularly about the nature of this modern Republican party — says that these powers will be used for domestic political purposes. That they felt they had to do this (even though they can monitor anyone they choose immediately as long as they make an application for a FISA review within 72 hours) can only raise suspicions that this is what they were doing. Coming on the heels of the pentagon spying story, you have to have overdosed on kool-aid not to wonder why they refuse to show the secret FISA court who they are monitoring. (Somebody needs to shake loose that list of NSA intercepts of American citizens John Bolton requested.)
National security cases … often reflect a convergence of First and Fourth Amendment values not present in cases of ‘ordinary’ crime. Though the investigative duty of the executive may be stronger in such cases, so also is there greater jeopardy to constitutionally protected speech. ‘Historically the struggle for freedom of speech and press in England was bound up with the issue of the scope of the search and seizure power. History abundantly documents the tendency of Government—however benevolent and benign its motives—to view with suspicion those who most fervently dispute its policies. Fourth Amendment protections become the more necessary when the targets of official surveillance may be those suspected of unorthodoxy in their political beliefs. The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent. Senator Hart addressed this dilemma in the floor debate on § 2511(3):
“‘As I read it—and this is my fear—we are saying that the President, on his motion, could declare—name your favorite poison—draft dodgers, Black Muslims, the Ku Klux Klan, or civil rights activists to be a clear and present danger to the structure or existence of the Government.”
The administration may even be fooling itself that it needs all this “wartime” power to “protect America.” But the real purpose of a government spying on its own citizens is only really about one thing — political power. If there’s anything we know about the modern Republican party it’s that everything that can be done to feed the machine will be done. They are the very definition of why the founders created this ridiculously byzantine system of checks and balances — to keep people like Ted Olsen and Karl Rove from turning this country into the tyranny like the one from which we had just freed ourselves.
Has Christopher “I heart Orwell” Hitchens weighed in on this yet? I’ll be anxious to hear him try to defend this new front in the fight against Oceania.
Jane notes that aside from the NY Times and the NSA spying issue there were quite a few other examples of the press withholding stories before the election. I can think of a couple more that she didn’t mention.
First there was the fact that 60 Minutes never showed the Niger uranium story (which they had bumped for the ill-fated National Guard expose.) They have never shown it to this day even though it has turned out to be much more relevant than the Dan Rather fiasco. And the NY Times wouldn’t run the story about the suspicious bulge in Bush’s jacket even though there was credible, scientific evidence that he was wearing some sort of ususual device on his back during the presidential debates (not to mention the incontrovertible evidence that we could see it with our own eyes.)
Karl Rove had blamed Bush’s loss in the 2000 race on the DWI story in the final days of the campaign and complained bitterly that the press had conspired to sandbag them. (It was nonsense, of course, because the story had come from a local FOX affiliate in Maine, but no matter.)We know that the press has often bent over backwards for the Republicans since the early 90’s to prove they are not politically biased. And after 9/11 they bent over backwards to prove they are not soft or unpatriotic. Withholding this story was a natural result of all those pressures.
The media need to stop rationalizing their behavior and recognise that they have, in many small and large ways, capitulated to GOP pressure for some time now and they lost their perspective. I am sympathetic to how difficult it must be to deal with the Republicans. They are aggressive, hostile and relentless. But it’s gone way too far. The havoc they wreaked on domestic politicsin the 90’s was bad enough. We survived a partisan impeachment circus and a dubious presidential election, but it weakened our system.
Now we are talking about national security and very serious constitutional issues. The president is openly admitting that he did things that were illegal — and he and his supporters are asserting a defense that the president has no obligation to follow the law in wartime.
The press simply has to step up. This is serious shit; it’s not about ancient land deals in Arkansas or lying about infidelity. This isn’t about “sending a message.” It’s real and its dangerous. This democracy is dying the death of a thousand cuts and in this world of too much information, over stimulation and endless distractions we must depend upon the press to wake up and start telling the American people what they know. The president is asserting a new interpretation of the constitution and unless this country makes it very, very clear that we will not stand for it, we are in deep trouble. This won’t happen unless the media does its job and tells the country the truth:
The president broke the law, admitted it and says that he will continue to do so. He did this because he believes that the president has the right to break any law he chooses in his capacity as commander in chief.
Democrats on the committee said the panel issued 1,052 subpoenas to probe alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party between 1997 and 2002, at a cost of more than $35 million. By contrast, the committee under Davis has issued three subpoenas to the Bush administration, two to the Energy Department over nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, and one last week to the Defense Department over Katrina documents.
Some experts on Congress say that the legislative branch has shed much of its oversight authority because of a combination of aggressive actions by the Bush administration, acquiescence by congressional leaders, and political demands that keep lawmakers out of Washington more than before.
Yah think?
People say the Democrats are spineless, but they are nothing to the invertebrate GOP congress who have willingly abdicated their constitutional duty to enhance the power of the president and the Republican Machine. No pride, no integrity, no standards.
The paper offered no explanation to its readers about what had changed in the past year to warrant publication. It also did not disclose that the information is included in a forthcoming book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” written by James Risen, the lead reporter on yesterday’s story. The book will be published in mid-January, according to its publisher, Simon & Schuster.
It was the following that I found truly interesting however:
The decision to withhold the article caused some friction within the Times’ Washington bureau, according to people close to the paper. Some reporters and editors in New York and in the bureau, including Risen and co-writer Eric Lichtblau, had pushed for earlier publication, according to these people. One described the story’s path to publication as difficult, with much discussion about whether it could have been published earlier.
As it happens, this very same thing happened a few months ago — at the Washington Post. Only the reporter wasn’t lobbying to report the news. In fact, he tried very hard to persuade his editor to hold back the news until his book came out.
Guess who:
Downie was insistent that the paper be adequately prepared for the death of Deep Throat — whoever he was. During the past year he’d pressed Woodward to tell him the name, arguing that the current editor should know the identity of our source. Woodward had resisted.
[…]
In March Bradlee told Woodward that Downie was right; the time had come to tell the current post editor who Deep Throat was; then appropriate plans could be made to cover Felt’s death. Woodward, an assistant managing editor at the paper, consented uneasily.
[…]
Woodward told Downie that the book should come out several weeks after Felt’s death, and that the Post could run a pre-publication excerpt and break the news at that time.
In retrospect it was a ridiculously haphazard plan, given the excitement that would inevitably and imediately follow Felt’s death without a confirmation or denial from Woodward and myself. Too much speculation was already focused on Felt.
[…]
[Downie] was adamant that the Post make the disclosure immediately after receiving the news of Felt’s death. First of all, it might leak, and he didn’t want to get scooped. Second, now that he knew Deep Throat’s identity for certain, he could not foresee allowing an obituary of Felt to appear in the Post that did not include this rather vital news. The Post, Woodward, Bradlee, myself — and now Downie — would be criticized severely if Felt’s identity as Deep Throat was withheld for more than a few hours after he died.
Among other considerations, it would appear that the delay was related to a commercial proposition — the marketing of a book — and Downie declared that he would have no part in that. He would not hold news, “and this would be news,” he said. Period. Frankly, he said, he could not comprehend how Woodward could consider any delay. “You have always said that the identity of Deep Throat would be disclosed upon his death,” he said, implying strongly, and perhaps in this instance correctly, that Woodward was losing touch with the daily flow of news.
(“Watergate’s Last Chapter” Carl Bernstein, Vanity Fair October, 2005,
No kidding. As we all learned a few weeks ago, Woodward does not particularly care about whether something is news or not.
I don’t know all the facts about the NY Times, obviously; by all accounts the reason for withholding the story was because the paper capitulated to administration arguments about national security. But it looks bad. Tony Blankley used the impending book release to deride the story on Mclaughlin.
Franklin Foer and the Columbia Journalism Review seem to agree with the John Harris contention that the blogosphere’s criticism of the mainstream media is a partisan crusade on both sides. It simply isn’t. The left blogosphere doesn’t complain that the media is too conservative or Republican. We see it as being cowardly in the face of Republican thuggishness and that’s something else entirely. And it’s not just editors like John Harris or Tim Russert kow towing to Republican complaints or the reporters adherence to the ridiculous conventions of “he said/she said.” Those are just the obvious. The more insidious type of cowardice is that which takes scurrillous Republican tips and runs with them under the guise of “it’s out there” or that simply lets them stick without bothering to put resources to debunking them. It’s derisively giggling on Imus at the puerile bitchiness of GOP talking points like “earth tones” and “flip-flop” like a bunch of teen-age Heathers. It’s mainstreaming rightwing hatemongers by putting Ann Coulter on the cover of Newsweek and giving Rush Limbaugh a slot on election night coverage.
This isn’t about policy or partisanship. It’s about a press corps that takes the easier path and capitulates to the aggressive, hostile (and sometimes seductive) Republican machine or gets so lost in their arcane standards of objectivity and journalistic ethics that the truth no longer matters.
The Bernstein article goes on to describe a ridiculous tug of war that ensued when Vanity Fair broke the Felt story a few months later and Woodward insisted that the paper not confirm the story. He believed they couldn’t be sure that Felt really wanted to be released from the confidentiality agreement because he was old and couldn’t be relied upon to know his own mind. He argued that it would be dishonorable to confirm it even if the whole damned world already knew about it. Keeping the secret had become a singular virtue so important that it superceded all journalistic values.
Bernstein agreed at first and then was persuaded otherwise. He wrote:
In our conviction to uphold one fundamental principle (protecting our sources) we risked violating another — loyalty to the larger truth — and offense that would damage the reputation of all involved: The Post, felt ourselves.
It’s that — the loyalty to the larger truth — that we are looking for.
It turns out that FISA specifically empowers the Attorney General or his designee to start wiretapping on an emergency basis even without a warrant so long as a retroactive application is made for one “as soon as practicable, but not more than 72 hours after the Attorney General authorizes such surveillance.” (see specific citation, here).
“Timliness” was stated over and over again yesterday by administration apologists as the reason that they could not take the time to apply to the FISA cout for permission. That is obviously crap. They simply do not want to have to apply for permission from FISA.
As far as I’m concerned there is only one reason for that. They do not want FISA (who has only been known to deny permission one time since its inception) to find out who they are surveilling.
This is the problem with a surveillance society — and makes me nervous as hell. I research this kind of stuff all the time. Can anybody explain why a student who has traveled abroad should be visited by the FBI because he requests “The Little Red Book” from the library?
A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.” Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program.
The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.
The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a “watch list,” and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.
“I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book,” Professor Pontbriand said. “Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that’s what triggered the visit, as I understand it.”
Although The Standard-Times knows the name of the student, he is not coming forward because he fears repercussions should his name become public. He has not spoken to The Standard-Times.
The professors had been asked to comment on a report that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to spy on as many as 500 people at any given time since 2002 in this country.The eavesdropping was apparently done without warrants.
The Little Red Book, is a collection of quotations and speech excerpts from Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung. In the 1950s and ’60s, during the Cultural Revolution in China, it was required reading. Although there are abridged versions available, the student asked for a version translated directly from the original book.
The student told Professor Pontbriand and Dr. Williams that the Homeland Security agents told him the book was on a “watch list.” They brought the book with them, but did not leave it with the student, the professors said.
I keep hearing that there have been no abuses of the system, that the governemnt would never spy on people who don’t deserve it. But can there be any good reason why, in the name of protecting the country from terrorism, that Mao’s “Little Red Book” would be considered worthy of monitoring? Unless the Justice Department is using the Patriot Act to monitor citizens for Chi-Com sympathizing (which is entirely possible) I can only assume that a terrorist somewhere read the book and quoted from it, so reading it is considered a sign of terrorist activity.
If that’s the case, then I would assume that reading any revolutionary, historical or political tract that a terrorist has been known to read makes one a terrorist suspect. That’s an extremely broad brush and the only way that anyone could ensure that he or she is not going to come into the cross hairs of the government would be to not read any of those books, not criticize the government, not study terrorism, marxism, or even the American and French revolutions since a terrorist somewhere may have read about those things too.
And, in typical Bushian blowback this will result in less understanding of terrorism:
Dr. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk.
Update: Rick Perlstein reminds me that there is one powerful American political movement that studies Mao quite closely:
In Before the Storm, p. 396 and 31, I quote from “How To Win An Election” by Barry Goldwater’s campaign manager Steve Shadegg, who cites Mao Tse-tung’s “valuable book on the tactics of infiltration” as an inspiration for one of his specific organizing tactics for getting Barry elected. He quotes Mao: “Give me just two or three men in a village, and I will take the village.”
He also notes:
Paul Weyrich wrote, Cultural Conservatism, Theory and Practice: “Perhaps the model for Cultural Conservatism as a political force is Chairman Mao in reverse. His theory for taking over China was to capture the countryside; isolated the cities would fall. If we think of America outside Washington as the countryside and “Inside the Beltway” as the city, his theory is right.”
Perhaps the NSA heard something dicey at one of Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meeting that prompted them to follow-up on anyone reading “The Little Red Book.”
Grover, after all, is the connection between the movement conservatives and the Taliban.
Oh for Gawd’s sakes. Tom Brokaw is on Matthews boo-hooing that this NSA story stepped on Junior’s wonderful Iraq triumph. He explains that when you are at war you need to do things that are difficult and believes that most people in the country will agree that the administration needed to spy on Americans after 9/11. He agrees with analyst Roger Cressy (who I used to think was sane) that once the “window” of a possible impending attack closed they should have gone up to the hill and sought permission to keep spying on Americans with no judicial oversight. (I haven’t heard about this “window” before. Tom and Roger both seem to have a fantasy that the administration would not simply say that the “window” remains open as long as evil exists in the world.)
Look, the problem here, again, is not one of just spying on Americans, as repulsively totalitarian as that is. It’s that the administration adopted John Yoo’s theory of presidential infallibility. But, of course, it wasn’t really John Yoo’s theory at all; it was Dick Cheney’s muse, Richard Nixon who said, “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.”
This was not some off the cuff statement. It was based upon a serious constitutional theory — that the congress or the judiciary (and by inference the laws they promulgate and interpret) have no authority over an equal branch of government. The president, in the pursuit of his duties as president, is not subject to the laws. Citizens can offer their judgment of his performance every four years at the ballot box.
The Post: …Why hasn’t anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, we had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 election.
He, like Nixon, believes that the president has only one “accountability moment” while he is president. His re-election. Beyond that, he has been given a blank check. And that includes breaking the law since if the president does it, it’s not illegal, the president being the executive branch which is not subject to any other branch of govenrment.
John Yoo, the former deputy attorney general who wrote many of the opinion undergirding these findings (on torture as well as spying) explains that the congress has no right to abridge the president’s warmaking powers. Its only constitutional remedy to a war with which they disagree is to deny funding; they can leave the troops on the field with no food or bullets.
I suspect that there are many more of these instances out there in which the administration has simply ignored the law. They believe that the constitution explicitly authorizes them to do so.
After 9/11 these people went crazy and convinced themselves that the country was in such mortal, exitential danger that this theory of imperial presidential perogative was a necessity. They say they are doing it to protect the citizens of this country. But one thing that American conservatives used to understand was that our system of government was forged by people who understood that too much power invested in one place is dangerous and that sometimes the people needed to be protected from their own government. That’s fundamental to our laborious process of checks and balances and a free press. (Indeed, it was that principle on which they based their absolutist stand on the second amendment.)
Now we hear conservative commentators like Ronald Kessler, who was just interviewed (alone) on FoxNews, opining that the president did nothing illegal and was completely within his rights to spy on Americans. There is no longer any question that the government would ever abuse its power by, for instance, spying on Americans for political purposes and even if it did, we’re fighting for our lives and we have to accept these infringements for our own safety. I’m quite sure he’ll agree that a President Howard Dean should be given the same level of trust, aren’t you?
A commenter to Larry Johnson’s post over at TPM (reminding us that John Bolton was involved in some doing about NSA intercepts and American citizens) gives a nice historical view of the Yoo Doctrine:
Re: Spying on Americans and John Bolton (5.00 / 2) (#31) by JamesW on Dec 16, 2005 — 06:23:50 PM EST
The second part of the Yoo Doctrine is critical: it’s the President, not Congress, who decides whether the country is at war or not.
In an extreme Tory argument, Yoo can just about argue that this was English 18th-century doctrine, but since Parliament rigorously controlled the purse-strings, it surely wasn’t practice after 1688. [Yoo does make this argument — ed] I doubt if English Whigs like Fox accepted the theory either, let alone American rebels.
Where Yoo surely parts company with any sane constitutional thinking since the Roman Republic is the extension that the monarch/president gets to decide what counts as a war. For George III, George Washington, Lincoln. Woodrow Wilson and FDR, war is an organised conflict between societies or social groups. Police actions against pirates, slavers, and terrorists are not war. By treating the rhetorical “war on terror”, infinitely redefinable, as a real war with war’s legal consequences, the Bush administration has entered the 1984 terrain of totalitarianism.
Murray Waas has a very interesting article up today that reveals that the Plame smear happened concurrently with another smear job against Francis Townsend. It’s pretty clear that the cabal around Cheney has been operating as a shadow government within the White house agitating for its own policies from the beginning. (And Scooter Libby is a real piece ‘o work.)
The senior staff in the Office of the Vice President adamantly opposed Townsend’s appointment. The staff included two of Cheney’s closest aides: Libby, then the chief of staff and national security adviser to the vice president; and David Addington, who at the time was Cheney’s counsel but who has since succeeded Libby as chief of staff.
Among other things, Libby and Addington believed that Townsend would bring a more traditional approach to combating terrorism, and feared she would not sign on to, indeed might even oppose, the OVP’s policy of advocating the use of aggressive and controversial tools against terror suspects. One of those techniques is known as “extraordinary rendition,” in which terror suspects are taken to foreign countries, where they can be interrogated without the same legal and human-rights protections afforded to those in U.S. custody, including the protection from torture.
Libby’s opposition to Townsend was so intense that he asked at least two other people in the White House to obtain her personnel records. These records showed that she had been turned down for two lesser positions in the Bush administration because of her political leanings, according to accounts provided by current and former administration officials. Libby also spoke about leaking the material to journalists or key staffers or members on Capitol Hill, to possibly undercut Townsend, according to the same accounts.
I am going to take a great speculative leap here and suggest that Rove helped Libby with the Wilson smear at least partially as a way to smooth things over after he was ordered to support Townsend. Maybe that’s what led him to take that walk down the hall and tell Scoot that he’d gotten the job done with Novak.
After all, “Official A” not only mentioned that he had spoken with Novak — he told Libby that Novak was going to write a story about it.
Libby: Junior must have blown a gasket on that Novak column about Townsend. You’re slipping old man.
(High fives Addington)
Rove: Hey, you owe me one, dude. I got him to run with the Wilson thing.
Libby: Awesome!
(high fives all around.)
There have been reports that Rove was seriously pissed that he got caught up in one of Cheney’s little bag jobs without having all the facts (for instance that Plame was a NOC.)
According to Waas, Novak and Rove corroborate each others’ version of events in the Plame matter. Novak happened to be pursuing this story on Townsend and Plame came up at the end of the conversation:
The papers on Frances Townsend that Rove had on his desk on July 9 appear to have corroborated Rove’s and Novak’s accounts to prosecutors that the principal focus of their conversation was Townsend’s appointment. But on the issue of Valerie Plame, prosecutors have been unable to determine whether in fact Novak was the one who first broached the subject, and whether Rove simply confirmed something that Novak already knew. Sources close to the investigation say this uncertainty is one of the foremost reasons Fitzgerald has not decided yet whether to bring criminal charges against Rove.
I’m not sure why that’s relevant, actually, unless Fitz has been trying to nail Rove on a conspiracy charge. As far as I know (and contrary to an earlier Waas story) Rove apparently admitted the Novak conversation from the beginning. His problems stem from his strangely vague recollection of where he got the information and repeatedly lying about the Cooper conversation, doling out the truth only in dribs and drabs as he was absolutely forced to do so.
I wouldn’t necessarily be able to prove it in a court of law, but it’s obvious to anyone who’s followed this story that there was a concerted effort to out Plame. This story today actually serves more as supplemental proof that the White house is a cauldron of intrigue and double dealing, a place in which it’s perfectly believable that outing a CIA agent for political purposes or because of interagency pique is common practice. That’s the type of people we are dealing with. But then we knew that.
But there is a little tid-bit in this article that I find very, very interesting:
Novak indicated to Rove that he was still going to write a column that would be critical of Townsend. But according to an account that Novak later provided of his conversation with Rove, he also signaled to Rove that Wilson and Plame would be the subject of one of his columns. “I think that you are going to be unhappy with something that I write,” he said to Rove, “and I think you are very much going to like something that I am about to write.”
On July 10, Novak’s column appeared in newspapers across the country, with a headline suggested by Novak’s syndicate: “Bush Sets Himself Up for Another Embarrassment.”
The column referred to Townsend as another potential “enemy within.” Novak opined that Townsend would likely prove disloyal to Bush, because she had been “an intimate adviser of Janet Reno as the Clinton administration’s attorney general,” and he pointedly noted that earlier in her career, “Townsend’s boss and patron … was [then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York] Jo Ann Harris, whose orientation was liberal Democratic.”
Four days later, on July 14, Novak wrote his now-famous column on Plame, in which he outed her as an “agency operative.”
According to the article, Rove had not been in favor of her appointment originally, but he’d been tasked by Bush to defend her in the press and by all accounts he followed orders and did that. If Novak’s statement is true, then the column that Novak thought Rove was going to be unhappy about was the Townsend article. That means that Novak knew that the column about Wilson was going to make Rove happy.
In order to understand why this is significant, you have to go back and look at the column in which Novak outs Plame. It quite mildly states that the Vice President didn’t send Wilson (which Wilson had never claimed) but it is not particularly critical of Wilson — the man with whom both Rove and Libby are reported to have been obsessed. In fact, it is surprisingly complimentary:
Wilson’s mission was created after an early 2002 report by the Italian intelligence service about attempted uranium purchases from Niger, derived from forged documents prepared by what the CIA calls a “con man.” This misinformation, peddled by Italian journalists, spread through the U.S. government. The White House, State Department and Pentagon, and not just Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it.
That’s where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein’s wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed “the stuff of heroism.” President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998.
Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. “I will not answer any question about my wife,” Wilson told me.
If Novak told Rove that he would be happy with that column there can be only one reason —- Plame. And you can see why. After all, Rove has admitted to coordinating a campaign to circulate the information about Plame after Novak’s column was published.
Wilson told NEWSWEEK that in the days after the Novak story appeared, he got calls from several well-connected Washington reporters. One was NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell. She told NEWSWEEK that she said to Wilson: “I heard in the White House that people were touting the Novak column and that that was the real story.” The next day Wilson got a call from Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC show “Hardball.”? According to a source close to Wilson, Matthews said, “?I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife was fair game.” (Matthews told NEWSWEEK: “I am not going to talk about off-the-record conversations.”?)
You can certainly see why Rove would be “happy” that Novak had taken the bait. It gave them the hook they needed to really go after Wilson. They were running a double game with Tenet publicly falling on his sword to calm down the yellowcake story while they were prodding the press throughout to taint Wilson as a henpecked loser who needed his wife to give him something to do.
In the end the case against Rove does appear to turn on his rolling disclosures to the prosecutor about Cooper. We pretty much knew that. But the more you hear about how this all came about the more you see what a devious, paranoid atmosphere pervades this White House. I think perhaps the country would be far better off if they were all getting blow jobs from interns instead of expending all this energy plotting against their rivals and enemies, both perceived and real.