My final pre-indictment blather on Plamegate

Patton Patton

...if such indictments even occur, that is.

I've been struck by the blood-in-the-water partisanship this saga has engendered, even as it's seemed clearer and clearer that no crime was committed under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Yeah, I know, she either was or she wasn't covert, and we can argue about that all day long. Well, you can, because I don't really care. We can also argue about intent to disclose known classified information for the purposes of thwarting the agent's mission, but you'd have trouble finding justification for any assertions of "intent", "known classified" and "thwarting". That, and, well I really don't care about that part either.

The part I do care about is the assumption underlying all this nastiness.

Via an op-ed found in today's Houston Barnacle, which attempts to compare & contrast the role of the press in what the author appears to think are the two defining scandals of our time, the discerning reader can learn that:

The break-in at the Watergate was carried out by a team of burglars hired by a White House operative. The current probe points to a scenario in which the dirty work apparently was done, perhaps unwittingly, by reporters who were fed classified information from officials out to get even with Wilson.

The op-editorialist issues some weasel-like qualifiers and then states with authority what everyone knows, just knows!, about the story, namely that officials were "out to get even with Wilson".

I demur. They weren't trying to get even with him, because it's not like they got Valerie Wilson fired, demoted, or anything else. Absent Administration knowledge of some Joe Wilson peccadillo that relied on the illusion of regular congress with an undercover (or, not, but I still don't care) CIA operative, revenge isn't a credible assertion. Some would call it clarification, some rebuttal, and still others an attempt to discredit Wilson. Sadly, leaving him alone to continue thinking himself crucial and important would have been enough to do that, without any effort on anyone else's part. Wilson, undone by his own yammering cake-hole, would have faded from view many months ago.

There may be indictments, but my guess is that they'd be for obstruction of one sort or another, rather than for a violation of Title 50421 of the US Code. Which is a real shame, because while Joe Wilson is a fatuous fabulist, the world could have found that out with no outside help. And the underlying theme, that revenge somehow played a part in this drama, is hogwash.

Other views exist. But they, too, are focused on everything but the stupidity of the underlying assumption.

Posted by Patton Patton on   |   § 6

§ 6 Comments

1

Her official CIA status was _covert_, period. Did Rove and Libby know this _prior_ to talking to reporters? Uncertain, but highly probable. Did Rove and/or Libby reveal her as an agent? Yes. Did they do this for political purposes? Yes. Why? To break the connection between the choice of Joseph Wilson as "investigator" and the Vice President, and recast his report as partisan rather than offocial.

Moving on -- Bush stood up two years ago and said, without hesitation, that his senior staff was not involved in any way. When he said this his senior staff knew _full well_ that they _were_ directly involved, crime or no crime. Either they lied to him, or he lied to us. Take your pick, Patton.

Let's give Bush the benefit of the doubt (which I am inclined to do) on this one. That means Libby and/or Cheney and/or Rove _lied_ to this President, about something reasonably important. Exactly how far do you want to go to protect them?

If they got in front of the Grand Jury way back when and said they had nothing to do with it, they committed a crime. I have _no problem_ whatsoever with any their asses landing in jail purely over that issue.

If they didn't do anything wrong, they shouldn't have lied to the President and lied to a grand jry to cover it up.

Ross Ross

2

Regarding whatever it is that whomever has done:

Did they do this for political purposes? Yes. Why? To break the connection between the choice of Joseph Wilson as “investigator” and the Vice President, and recast his report as partisan rather than offocial.

Indubitably. I simply have trouble with the entire characterization of it as some form of "revenge".

As for protecting the unfortunately monikered "Scooter" and "Turdblossom", I've got no agenda for either. If they screwed up, they should be jettisoned. If they lied to cover up their actions, whether the actions were illegal or not, they should be jettisoned.

My point, perhaps not clearly enough articulated, remains that the driver of this story has been the feigned claims of some form of revenge, which I continue to find a laughable motivation. But "revenge" as a storyline was designed to evoke outrage, where the actual truth was considerably less incendiary.

Patton Patton

3

Jacob Weisberg on slate has a take on this from teh liberal side, and he's not exactly happy with the whole thing.

Hold the schadenfreude, blue-staters. Rooting for Rove's indictment in this case isn't just unseemly, it's unthinking and ultimately self-destructive. Anyone who cares about civil liberties, freedom of information, or even just fair play should have been skeptical about Fitzgerald's investigation from the start. Claiming a few conservative scalps might be satisfying, but they'll come at a cost to principles liberals hold dear: the press's right to find out, the government's ability to disclose, and the public's right to know.

No one disputes that Bush officials negligently and stupidly revealed Valerie Plame's undercover status. But after two years of digging, no evidence has emerged that anyone who worked for Bush and talked to reporters about Plame—namely Rove or Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff—knew she was undercover. And as nasty as they might be, it's not really thinkable that they would have known. You need a pretty low opinion of people in the White House to imagine they would knowingly foster the possible assassination of CIA assets in other countries for the sake of retaliation against someone who wrote an op-ed they didn't like in the New York Times.

Losing a sense of proportion, and of reality, is an occupational hazard when arguing about politics. But Joseph Wilson's accusation that administration officials outed his wife to punish him for speaking up was never really credible. And by now, a small mountain of evidence points toward a more plausible, nondiabolical motivation for the accidental blowing of Plame's cover.

Buckethead Buckethead

5

B.s. Let's see -- Plame is the wife of the ambassador, with no other visible profession. Let's just say that it's _frequent_ that embassy staffmembers might be attached to the CIA. If you, as a senior White House staff member with clearance at the highest levels, know or are told that a certain wife of a certain ambassador is a CIA officer, do you then assume that it's perfectly OK to just tell anyone you like about it?

No -- that would be stupid. And the men under Bush aren't stupid. But if you're angry about something and want to strike back, or you want to create some political distance between yourself and the target of your ire, you make a few calls and figure you'll stay anonymous.

Why are you ignoring the elephant in the room? Two years ago Bush said that ANYONE involved would no longer be a member of the administration. Libby has had TWO YEARS to tell the truth about this -- that he disclosed her identity. He could then have argued (perhaps successfully) that he had no idea she was an undercover agent. Instead, he has done his level best to _conceal_ this fact from the public. It is entirely possible that he has lied in testimony to the Grand Jury on this matter.

If so, are you willing to apply the Clinton test? If Bush knew and "misstated" this to the Grand Jury or in deposition, should the same apply to him?

And nondiabolical? Libby didn't _accidentally_ call up six reporters. He was doing it for a reason -- hardball politics, designed to attack the credibility of Wilson. Maybe you don't want to call it revenge. Are you more comfortable with "attack"?

He deliberately revealed that she was a CIA officer to the press, knowing full well that would be printed, become a part of stories, and damage her career. If he sought to attack Wilson, why do so through agent Plame, a third party?

Should everyone who works for the agency but not necessarily undercover rest comfortably knowing that senior administration officials can and may publish their identities to the world at large for political reasons?

One of the first things that regular CIA employees are told about is that they should not mention their employer when travelling, or at any time it is not necessary to do so. There's no reason to invite trouble into your home.

Ross Ross

6

Who you talkin' to, Willis? Me?

Did I apply the Clinton test even back when Clinton was still Prez? (No, but you couldn't possibly know that). If so...

There are a lot of dependent "ifs" at the start of your storyline there - I don't know that it's yet a given that anyone in the WH actually knew what Plame did at the CIA.

I still discount revenge as any kind of motivation (which was my entire point in the original), and agree completely that an "attack", being one of the best-loved ways to discredit an opponent, is what was at work here. Did they "attack" him? Oh yeah.

Did they attack him "through" Plame? Newp. The same nepotism (used descriptively here, not critically) that made it possible for her to recommend him made her involvement the reason for the attack, not a target of it. His initial lying about her involvement was pure icing on the cake.
And the nepotism makes her anything but a third party.

To the larger point, the "elephant in the room", that's part of a different discussion than the one I started, but to reiterate - if anyone in the WH broke a law (even what Kay Bailey Hutchison calls "one of them there perjury laws"), off with their head, says me.

Satisfied?

Patton Patton

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