Bush is afraid of firing his adviser

[Zanfanginen*]

From Associated Press July 12 2005


White House Maintains Silence About Rove
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

The White House is suddenly facing damaging evidence that it misled the public by insisting for two years that presidential adviser Karl Rove wasn't involved in leaking the identity of a female CIA officer.

President Bush, at an Oval Office photo opportunity Tuesday, was asked directly whether he would fire Rove — in keeping with a pledge in June, 2004, to dismiss any leakers in the case. The president did not respond.

For the second day, White House press secretary Scott McClellan refused to answer questions about Rove.

Rove told Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper that the woman "apparently works" for the CIA and that she had authorized her husband's trip to Africa to assess allegations that Iraq was trying to obtain yello
wcake uranium for nuclear weapons, according to a July 11, 2003, e-mail by Cooper obtained by Newsweek magazine.

The e-mail is now in the hands of federal prosecutors who are hunting down the leakers inside the Bush administration who revealed the name of Valerie Plame to the news media.

The revelation about Rove prompted Democratic calls for President Bush to follow through on his promise to fire leakers of Plame's identity, and triggered 61 questions during two press briefings Monday by McClellan.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts said Tuesday that "Karl Rove ought to be fired." With Kerry on Capitol Hill was Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. a possible 2008 presidential contender, who indicated her agreement with Kerry's view.

"I'm nodding," she told reporters.

It was McClellan who provided the previous assurances about no role for Rove, but he refused to repeat those assurances Monday.

"Did Karl Rove commit a crime?" a
reporter asked McClellan.

"This is a question relating to an ongoing investigation," McClellan replied.

McClellan gave the same answer when asked whether President Bush has confidence in Rove, the architect of the president's successful political campaigns.

The investigation was ongoing in 2003 when McClellan assured the public Rove wasn't involved, a reporter pointed out, but the spokesman refused to elaborate.

In September and October 2003, McClellan said he had spoken directly with Rove about the matter and that "he was not involved" in leaking Plame's identity to the news media. McClellan said at the time: "The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved," "It was a ridiculous suggestion" and "It's not true."

Rove's own public denials at the time and since have been more narrowly worded: "I didn't know her name and didn't leak her name," Rove said last year.

Democrats pressed Bush to act.

"The White House promised if anyone was involved in the Va
lerie Plame affair, they would no longer be in this administration," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "I trust they will follow through on this pledge. If these allegations are true, this rises above politics and is about our national security."

Democratic consultant Paul Begala, appearing on ABC's "Good Morning America" Tuesday, said Rove has both a legal problem and a political problem.

He said the legal issue should be resolved by the grand jury. Begala also said the White House has a political problem because "people are going to look at this crowd and say, Gee, we can't trust a thing they say after the WMD (weapons of mass destruction) controversy.' "

New York Times reporter Judith Miller is in jail for refusing to reveal who in the administration talked to her about Plame.

Cooper had also planned to go to jail rather than talk, but at the last minute he agreed to cooperate with investigators when a source, Rove, gave him permission to do so. Cooper's empl
oyer, Time Inc., also turned over Cooper's e-mail and notes.

One of the e-mails was a note from Cooper to his boss in which he said he had spoken to Rove, who described the wife of former U.S. Ambassador and Bush administration critic Joe Wilson as someone who "apparently works" at the CIA, Newsweek magazine reported.

It said "Wilson's wife" — not CIA Director George Tenet or Vice President Dick Cheney — authorized a trip by Wilson to Africa. The purpose was to check out reports that Iraq had tried to obtain yellowcake uranium for use in nuclear weapons.

Rove's conversation with Cooper took place five days after Plame's husband suggested in a New York Times op-ed piece that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq. Wilson's trip to Africa provided the basis for his criticism.

Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer, said his client did not disclose Plame's name. Luskin declined to say how Rove found out that
Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and refused to say how Rove came across the information that it was Wilson's wife who authorized his trip to Africa.

[Zanfanginen*]

From Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-oe-rscheer12jul12,0,7142498.column

ROBERT SCHEER
The real Rove scandal
Robert Scheer

July 12, 2005

If you can't shoot the messenger, take aim at his wife.

That clearly was the intent of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove in leaking to a reporter that former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent. To try to conceal the fact that the president had lied to the American public about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, Rove attempted to destroy the credibility of two national security veterans and send an intimidating message to any other government officials preparing to publicly tell the truth.

Rove's lawyer now says that Rove didn't break the law against naming covert agents because he didn't know Plame's name and therefore
couldn't have revealed it. Perhaps he can use such a technicality in court, but in the meantime he should resign immediately — or be fired by the president — for leaking classified information, trying to smear Wilson and possibly endangering Plame's life.

"The White House promised if anyone was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, they would no longer be in this administration," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). "I trust they will follow through on this pledge."

The background on this story is crucial. Ambassador Wilson had been honored as a patriot by President George H.W. Bush for standing up to Saddam Hussein in a face-to-face confrontation in Baghdad on the eve of the Persian Gulf War. But in 2003, Wilson committed an unpardonable crime in the eyes of the second Bush White House. He exposed its lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

In 16 now infamous words in Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, the president — desperate to gain support for an
invasion he was dead set on initiating — tried to scare Americans into believing Iraq was close to making nuclear weapons. "The British government," he told the nation, "has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." But the key documents that the claim was based on had already been proved to be fakes, and other intelligence reports along these lines were extremely speculative.

In fact, it was a CIA-organized mission by Wilson to the African country of Niger (where he had served as ambassador) that determined the reports were false. Wilson was therefore shocked to hear the uranium claims in the president's speech. When he exposed the chicanery in a New York Times commentary, Wilson became a prime target for a White House smear job.

According to e-mails that Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper sent to his editor (which were revealed by Newsweek over the weekend), Rove told Cooper that Wilson's devastating expose should be discounted because th
e Niger fact-finding trip had been authorized by Wilson's wife, who worked at the CIA.

This was three days before Robert Novak, citing two White House sources, outed Plame as a CIA agent in his column and put forward the same notion: that Wilson's information was suspect because the CIA had hired him on the advice of his wife.

In the end, though, what Rove's leak and Novak's column really exposed was the depravity of the administration's deliberate use of a false WMD threat and its willingness to go after anyone willing to tell the truth about it.

It's ironic that the expertise of this couple should be turned against them by a White House that has demonstrated nothing but incompetence in dealing with the WMD issue. But clearly truth and competence are virtues easily shed by the Bush administration in the pursuit of political advantage, even when this partisan game jeopardizes national security.

This is the most important issue raised by the Plame scandal. It has been unfort
unately obscured by the secondary debate in the case: whether reporters should ever reveal their sources. Yet what the emerging Rove scandal demonstrates is the ease with which a wily top White House official can subvert the Bill of Rights' protection of the free press to serve the tawdriest of political ends.

[Marilyn*]

AlterNet, 13 July 2005: http://www.alternet.org/story/23506/

Code Rove

By Evan Derkacz
AlterNet

July 13, 2005


Okay, keep your eye on the ball: Karl Rove endangered America.

But, you've been keeping up, reading, watching TV, and you've undoubtedly heard (or will hear) that Karl Rove didn't say the words "Valerie Plame," or he didn't mean to blow her cover -- or was her cover too threadbare to even matter? -- or Joe Wilson's claims weren't true, or else he was trying to save a reporter from printing a false story, or....

...Hey, look over there: MoveOn.org is unpatriotic!

Confused? Well, that's the plan, anyway. By shattering the story into a dozen shards, defenders of Rove's dangerous abuse of power hope to shift the debate away from the scandalous fact that K
arl Rove endangered America by leaking the classified information that Joseph Wilson's wife "works at the agency" (CIA). In fact, the GOP's latest talking points on the Rove scandal focus almost exclusively on smearing Joseph Wilson -- which is ironic, to say the least, given the fact that this whole scandal began with a smear of Joseph Wilson.

Ignore it. Joseph Wilson didn't order Karl Rove to leak the identity of his wife.

Next, lawyers and "experts" will parse the legalese: Here are the A, B and C required to convict Karl Rove of violating the law, they'll say. Again, ignore it. It's not about the letter of the law, it's about two simple facts:

- Karl Rove endangered America
- Karl Rove retains his security clearance and the trust of President Bush, thus enabling him to do it again.

All the remaining questions being filtered to the media for scripted debate on Hannity and Colmes or Hardball[/i:2af0b
17cfe] are, to varying degrees, worth debating. Sometime. And in a balanced venue. But right now, the most important strands in this scandal are the two simple, irrefutable facts above.


A 'Treasonous' Action

This is not a partisan issue. Back in October of 2003, shortly after Robert Novak -- over CIA protestations -- published Plame's identity, a group of former CIA agents testified before a Senate Democratic Policy Committee on the outing of their colleague. The agents, Larry Johnson, Michael Grimaldi and Brent Cavan, all of whom are Republicans, pulled no punches in their shared statement:

"We also want to send a clear message to the political 'operatives' responsible for 'outing' Mrs. Wilson. Such action was treacherous, if not treasonous...Such action has allowed the less attractive aspects of politics to supersede the Government's responsibility to protect the citizens of this nation and the individuals who serve in difficult, dangerous covert
capacities. This has set a sickening precedent. The 'senior Administration officials' who did this have warned all U.S. intelligence officers and the intelligence community that any one individual may be compromised if providing information or factual analysis the White House does not like."

We now know that the "senior Administration official" referred to in the above testimony is Karl Rove. We know it because his email to [i]Time magazine's Matt Cooper says so and because Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, all but cemented this fact when he "updated" his public statements from: "[Rove] did not reveal any confidential information," to the more litigation-proof: "[Karl Rove] never knowingly disclosed classified information."

There's a certain irony at work when the president's most trusted adviser, Karl Rove, outs Valerie Plame, a WMD specialist, while waging a war on Iraq which was, publicly at least, about protecting America from WMD.[/b:
2af0b17cfe]

Outing her not only jeopardized whatever she was working on at the time but, as the Washington Post reported, "Every foreign intelligence service would run Plame's name through its databases within hours of its publication to determine if she had visited their country and to reconstruct her activities."

The article also warned that, "Intelligence officials have said that once Plame's job as an undercover operative was revealed, other agency secrets could be unraveled and her sources might be compromised or endangered."

But let's return to the testimony of the former CIA agents for the specifics:

"If left unpunished, this cowardly act [blowing Plame's cover] will not only hinder our efforts to recruit qualified individuals into the clandestine service, but it will have a far-reaching, deleterious effect on our ability to recruit foreign intelligence assets overseas. Who in their right mind would ever agree to become a spy f
or the United States when we cannot even protect our own undercover officers?"

[b]As for assertions that Valerie Plame wasn't "especially well hidden" or that her cover wasn't "double super secret," not only is that not the issue, it's a rather stupid card to whip out in this particular hand. After all, a major part of the legal argument employed by Rove and his lawyer is that Rove didn't "knowingly" expose the classified nature of Valerie Plame's identity.

So which is it? Already a certain amount of digging had to be done for Rove to even come up with the information that Valerie Plame had recommended her husband for the Niger job. In the course of this digging, Rove must have, at a bare minimum, learned that Plame's status was classified. Did he also do enough digging to learn that her front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, wasn't terribly well hidden? If he came up with that much information,
made that great a calculation, doesn't that destroy the ignorance plea that he didn't "knowingly" reveal an agent's identity?

Just after the leak in late September 2003, White House spokesman Scott McClellan declared, "the president knows" that Rove wasn't involved and that it was "a ridiculous suggestion" that was "simply not true." And: "I've made it very clear, he was not involved, that there's no truth to the suggestion that he was."

A couple weeks later, referring to Rove, Scooter Libby and Elliot Abrams, he was once again very clear: "I spoke with them, so that I could come back to you and say that they were not involved. I had no doubt with that in the beginning, but I like to check my information to make sure it's accurate before I report back to you, and that's exactly what I did."

The fact that McClellan lied in the above statement unleashed a torrent of unusually forceful questions from reporters at Monday's p
ress conference, including this one:

"Scott, I think you're [being] barrage[d] today in part because we -- it is now clear that 21 months ago, you were up at this podium saying something that we now know to be demonstrably false. Now, are you concerned that in not setting the record straight today that this could undermine the credibility of the other things you say from the podium?"

For its part, the White House has remained mostly silent, preferring instead to let others do the talking -- via its Talking Points, of course. In its stead, the RNC, pundits and the pom-pom squad (blogs like Powerline, Captain's Quarters, Blogs for Bush, Michelle Malkin, etc.) are busy focus-testing these talking points attempting to occupy and divert the press until it gets bored and seizes on the next big issue (the Supreme Court, another hurricane, another celebrity trial).

But that will only divert attention from the facts: Karl Rove endangered America; the administration'
s credibility is severely damaged; reporters are questioning whether anything said in press briefings can be trusted.

The final desperate attempt at instant historical revisionism may look like this: Sure, Rove did it and it's good that he did. Valerie Plame wasn't in line with the Bush administration's plans for invading Iraq and so she deserved to be outed. This Soviet mentality has already debuted on Fox (video here) and you can bet it'll be the tactic of choice should all else fail -- which, from the look of recent press conferences, isn't exactly a pipe dream.

An interesting historical footnote on Rove and his sleazy tactics. Not only does Rove know this dance, but he and his partner have danced it before. A Nov. 9, 2003 Houston Chronicle article by Rick Casey reveals that Rove w
as fired from Pappy Bush's '92 re-election campaign. The reason: he leaked information intended to smear a political opponent (a fellow Republican) to a national columnist.

That columnist's name was Robert Novak.

It's not bad enough that Karl Rove endangered America. Bush continues to leave this high-risk, one-man sleeper cell positioned to do it again.


Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute.