Author: Greg Saunders

Since the White House’s efforts to spin their way out of the fact that they’re harboring a traitor have been a huge failure, here are a few suggestions for ways Republicans who don’t really care about national security can defend Karl Rove :

The Polyamory Defense

In an email to Time’s Matt Cooper, Karl Rove mentioned “Wilson’s wife” works for the CIA, but everybody just jumped to the conclusion that Wilson is only married to one woman. While the investigation is ongoing, it’s too early to tell whether Wilson was or wasn’t a bigamist. Until Fitzgerald has completed his inquiry, the question isn’t whether or not Rove revealed Valerie Plame’s CIA status (which is obviously wrong), but which one of Wilson’s wives was Rove referring to?

The Unwritten Rule Defense

What people outside of Washington don’t understand is that it’s common for government insiders to reveal top secret information to reporters with the understanding that the information in question will never, ever find its way into print. What’s truly unusual in this instance was the snitching of that rat bastard Matt Cooper. Everyone who’s worked in the Capitol for a while has received a few phone calls which anyone with an understanding of journalistic ethics knows you’re not supposed to talk about. Just ask any Washington insider about Bill Clinton’s late night phone calls to tell people what’s really in Area 51 or Bush Sr.’s chats with reporters about hiding out on the grassy knoll waiting for Kennedy’s motorcade. This isn’t a big deal.

The “Librul Commie” Defense

When Valerie “Wilson” gave $1000 to Al Gore in 2000, it compromised her the CIA dummy corporation she used as a front, Brewster-Jennings & Associates. But if one of our CIA covert operatives is aiding and abetting that nerd who thinks he invented the internets, where do her allegiances really stand? That alone is enough to suggest she may have been a double agent working for the Reds.

The “He Was Helping Her” Defense

It’s funny how much these silly little “bloggers” think they know about how the CIA works. At a certain point, an operative’s cover becomes so deep that it wraps around like a Moebius strip. At that level of cover, CIA operations require the outing of an agent as an exercise in black ops reverse reverse psychology. Rove, showing a clear understanding of CIA procedures, outed Plame in order to help her. If you want to know how the CIA really works, you’ve got to read one of the more informative manuals like “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”.

The 16 Words Defense

Karl Rove was trying to ensure that Joseph Wilson’s lies didn’t hurt our national security. Yes, Joseph Wilson went to Niger and determined that the documents regarding uranium shipments to Iraq were forgeries, but the President explicitly said “uranium from Africa“, not just Niger. Has Wilson looked into uranium shipments out of Lesotho, Burkina Faso, or Djibouti?? I didn’t think so…

Rove’s lawyer has the lamest defense ever (via TalkLeft) :

“Look at the Cooper e-mail,” Luskin continues. “Karl speaks to him on double super secret background…I don’t think that you can read that e-mail and conclude that what Karl was trying to do was to get Cooper to publish the name of Wilson’s wife.”

Good thing for Karl that the Intelligence Identities and Protection Act has a “double super secret background” clause. It’s right between the sections concerning “my fingers were crossed” and “just kidding”. I just hope Ruben Bolling is getting a commision from this schmuck.

Well, the Bush Administration’s deadline to produce benchmarks for the situation in Iraq passed yesterday. Think Progress notes :

It turns out the administration is willing to do just about anything — including violate the law — to avoid giving Americans a detailed picture of conditions on the ground in Iraq. A Pentagon spokesperson told me today that those Iraq indicators have been “delayed” and that there is currently no specific date set for their release.

We’re more than two years into this thing and still don’t have any way to judge the success or failure of the Bush Administration’s execution of the war. Now that their irresponsibility has legal repercussions, I suggest everyone contact the ranking members of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittees and ask them to demand that Donald Rumsfeld be held in contempt of Congress :

Sen. Daniel Inouye
202-224-3934
202-224-6747 (fax)
Senator_Inouye@inouye.senate.gov

Rep. John Murtha
202-225-2065
202-225-5709 (fax)
murtha@mail.house.gov

Be nice. These are the ranking members, not the committee chairs. We all know that contacting a GOP leader and asking them to hold the Bush Administration accountable for anything is a waste of time. Hopefully these leaders from the “opposition party” will lead this fight in their respective houses.

This bit from Salon does a good job in summing up the legalistic wingnut defense of Karl Rove :

As the Washington Post pointed out, “To be considered a violation of the law, a disclosure by a government official must have been deliberate, the person doing it must have known that the CIA officer was a covert agent, and he or she must have known that the government was actively concealing the covert agent’s identity.”

Based on Cooper’s e-mail with Rove, it isn’t clear that Rove knew Plame’s name. But even if Rove did know Plame’s name, which is likely, that fact is not as important as knowing her CIA status. In pointing out her occupation and association to Wilson, Rove was clearly identifying Plame. Was he then knowingly and deliberately disclosing a CIA operative? For that, Rove would have had to know that Plame was undercover. If he didn’t know that fact — if Rove knew Plame simply as Wilson’s wife who happened to work on WMD at the CIA — he didn’t commit a crime.

First of all, let’s cut through the “we’re still not sure that she was ‘covert'” line that a lot of conservatives are still clinging to. This investigation has been going on for almost two years now. Do you really think Fitzgerald would waste this much time and money on a snipe hunt that could be solved with a quick phone call to the CIA? Get serious guys.

Once we get into the Clintonian parsing of the word “knowingly”, things get really interesting. Having established that Plame was undercover and that Rove revealed that Plame was CIA, the question then becomes “Did Valerie Plame hide her undercover position at the CIA through a front job…at the CIA?” If you’re dumb enough to believe that, there’s nothing I can do to help you. For the rest of us, the fact that Rove knew about a connection between Joe Wilson’s wife and the CIA is damning enough to convict him.

While I’m on the subject of Plame’s undercover identity, do you guys remember this Washington Post article from Oct. 2003?

The leak of a CIA operative’s name has also exposed the identity of a CIA front company, potentially expanding the damage caused by the original disclosure, Bush administration officials said yesterday.

The company’s identity, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, became public because it appeared in Federal Election Commission records on a form filled out in 1999 by Valerie Plame, the case officer at the center of the controversy, when she contributed $1,000 to Al Gore’s presidential primary campaign.

After the name of the company was broadcast yesterday, administration officials confirmed that it was a CIA front. They said the obscure and possibly defunct firm was listed as Plame’s employer on her W-2 tax forms in 1999 when she was working undercover for the CIA.
. . .
The inadvertent disclosure of the name of a business affiliated with the CIA underscores the potential damage to the agency and its operatives caused by the leak of Plame’s identity. 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.

A former diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity said yesterday that 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.

This is much bigger than Valerie Plame. Due to the treasonous acts of Karl Rove et. al., any CIA agent that’s listed Brewster-Jennings & Associates as an employer has been compromised. The same goes for anybody that has vouched for Ms. Plame or vice versa. The simple disclosure of Valerie Plame’s identity has given foreign governments the seeds to unravel an unknowable chunk of our intelligence backbone.

An excerpt from today’s gaggle :

QUESTION: You stood at that podium and said that Karl Rove was not involved. And now we find out that he spoke about Joseph Wilson’s wife. So don’t you owe the American public a fuller explanation. Was he involved or was he not? Because contrary to what you told the American people, he did indeed talk about his wife, didn’t he?

MCCLELLAN: There will be a time to talk about this, but now is not the time to talk about it.

QUESTION: Do you think people will accept that, what you’re saying today?

MCCLELLAN: Again, I’ve responded to the question.

QUESTION: You’re in a bad spot here, Scott…

(LAUGHTER)

… because after the investigation began — after the criminal investigation was under way — you said, October 10th, 2003, “I spoke with those individuals, Rove, Abrams and Libby. As I pointed out, those individuals assured me they were not involved in this,” from that podium. That’s after the criminal investigation began.

Now that Rove has essentially been caught red-handed peddling this information, all of a sudden you have respect for the sanctity of the criminal investigation.

This is starting to give me a stomach ache. The way we liberal bloggers have been following this, it’s easy to see this as an enormous game of partisan “Gotcha!” that we’re all wrapped up in.

Well, it’s not.

I know that evoking 9/11 is a game that both sides of the aisle like to play to smear the other side, but I honestly can’t shake the mental imagery of the last four years of bloody chaos. Usually my mind focuses on two or three images at a time. This morning, for example, it was the people diving out of the burning WTC towers to escape the smoke, the grainy video of Danny Pearl saying “I am a Jew” just prior to being beheaded, and the shredded double decker bus in London. Other times I think about the gaping hole in the Pentagon or the photos that leaked of row after row of American flag draped coffins. Whatever it it, the message that’s drilled into my subconscious is the same :

Thousands of people have been killed already, but there are still others out there who want to murder you right now.

September 11th obviously effected everyone in profound ways, so I would never imply that my grief and fear is something unique to one political persuasion or another. But it still puzzles me when something this big only seems to generate outrage on one side of the aisle.

Right now there are people who want to murder as many Americans as possible. It doesn’t matter to them who their victims voted for, what religion they are, if they’re rich or poor, black, white, whatever. As long as the bodycount is high, it doesn’t matter who gets hit. The fact that the WTC towers were financial centers was secondary to the fact that hitting the largest buildings in the country at mid-morning would maximize the terrorists’ bloodshed. With these people wanting to kill so indiscriminately, it seems that the best means to this end is to make sure that we stop the spread of the appropriately-named weapons of mass destruction.

Yet here we are, almost four years later, and we’ve got a situation in which we’re 99% certain that the right hand man to the guy who’s in charge of keeping our nightmares for becoming a reality has been undercutting efforts to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. I honestly cannot understand why everyone who was effected by 9/11 isn’t outraged about this. I really can’t.

I don’t know what’s more frightening. Being kept up at night with neurotic fears about mushroom-clouds and evil terrorists, or the suspicion that the people who are supposed to be taking this fight seriously aren’t having the same nightmares.