Plame Case Thrown Out;
National Security Imperilled
by Juan Cole
Friday, July 20, 2007
http://www.juancole.com/2007/07/plame-case-thrown-out-national-security.html
A federal judge has thrown out the lawsuit of Valerie Plame Wilson against Bush administration figures Irv Lewis Libby, Karl Rove, Richard Bruce Cheney, and Richard Armitage. She sued them for conducting a campaign to out her in the press as an undercover operative and so ruining her career.
The judge interpreted Cheney Inc.'s outing of Plame as just politics and something to be expected of political office-holders. That is, he believed their story that they were just defending themselves politically from what they saw as a Central Intelligence Agency attempt to smear them and their Iraq War. He admitted that their methods were "unsavory."
It is a ruling about the jurisdiction of the court and so something technical in the law about which I don't feel qualified to comment. Just as a citizen, I cannot understand how committing what was essentially an act of treason (or trying very hard to) can be seen as part of the ordinary political duties of incumbents.
The judgment will be appealed to the Supreme Court, but given the coloration of that court, one hardly expects the justices to rule against Bush-Cheney.
But the world has a kind of karma, and the United States will be punished for what Cheney Inc. did to Plame Wilson.
Think about it. She worked against nuclear proliferation, including with regard to Iran,with a "non-official cover" (NOC). She was an undercover operative with extremely sensitive duties.
So what are the big security challenges facing the United States in the next decade? They include the regrouping of al-Qaeda and the threat of nuclear proliferation.
What the United States therefore needs most to secure our country is smart, knowledgeable, skilled and dedicated counter-terrorism and counter- proliferation professionals. Without such persons, we are in danger of being hit hard by smart, knowledgeable, skilled terrorists.
But here is the problem. If you are a NOC, you are living a lie. Your very identity as CIA would potentially put everyone around you in danger, especially your friends, contacts and the agents you are running in foreign countries. You yourself could easily be assassinated on a trip abroad if your identity became known.
So you would depend for your survival and for the survival of your friends and contacts on the US government's willingness and ability to keep your identity secret. If you thought that the vice president might casually betray your identity if he thought it politically convenient to do so, you'd be crazy to put yourself in that position.
So, we've had the Plame Wilson affair, the profound hostility of Cheney Inc. to the reality-based CIA (for not going along with its fantasy machine), the Cheney project of blaming CIA director George Tenet for his own mistakes with regard to Iraq, and the changes and rotations in top personnel. Competent Middle East analysts like former Deputy Director of Intelligence Jami Miscik have been forced out.
So ask yourself, how many really smart competent people are going to volunteer to follow in Valerie Plame Wilson's footsteps and take all those risks for a job that does not pay all that well, knowing that the Cheney sorts might at any moment ruin their lives for petty political reasons?
So Bush and Cheney have deeply damaged recruitment, morale and efforts among our counter-terrorism agencies at the same time that their greedy and duplicitous occupation of a major Arab Muslim country, Iraq, is generating a new terrorist threat against the American homeland. They are creating the perfect storm.
So the judge threw out the lawsuit. But we will all be paying the damages.
Bush-Cheney have disarmed us and galvanized the enemy. They are traitors, and if something happens to America, it will be in some important part their fault.
Broader Privilege Claimed In Firings
White House Says Hill Can't Pursue Contempt Cases
By Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 20, 2007; A01
Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071902625.html
Bush’s assertion of executive power:
The logic of presidential-military dictatorship
By Joe Kay
16 July 2007
At President Bush’s July 11 press conference [July 12] a significant exchange took place that has received very little media attention. Edwin Chen, who writes for Bloomberg.com, asked Bush, “How hard is it for you to conduct the war without popular support? Do you ever have trouble balancing between doing what you think is the right thing and following the will of the majority of the public, which is the essence of democracy?”
Bush’s response was to emphasize the role of the military as a counterweight to public opinion. He outlined a concept of presidential power that upholds the military as a critical “constituency” rising above, and placed in opposition to, the American people. On this basis, Bush sought to justify a policy that has been clearly repudiated by the general population—not only in opinion polls, but also in the November 2006 midterm elections…
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jul2007/bush-j16.shtml
Disregard subpoenas, Justice Dept says
The opinion raises questions over whether Bush officials would be prosecuted for not cooperating in probe of U.S. attorneys firings.
By Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writer
July 12, 2007
WASHINGTON — In a broadly worded legal opinion, the Justice Department has concluded that President Bush’s former top lawyer, and possibly other senior White House officials, can ignore subpoenas from Congress to testify about the firings of U.S. attorneys.
The three-page opinion raises questions about whether the Justice Department would prosecute senior administration officials if Congress voted to hold them in contempt for not cooperating with the investigation into the firing last year of eight top prosecutors.
The opinion was prepared this week by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, in response to questions from former White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers, who was subpoenaed to testify today before the House Judiciary Committee. Miers told the panel in a letter faxed Tuesday night that she would not appear, citing the Justice memo and advice from the White House…
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-usattys12jul12,1,7117374.story
Pentagon Rebukes Sen Clinton on Iraq
By DEVLIN BARRETT
Associated Press Writer
7/19/07
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon told Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton that her questions about how the U.S. plans to eventually withdraw from Iraq boosts enemy propaganda.
In a stinging rebuke to a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman responded to questions Clinton raised in May in which she urged the Pentagon to start planning now for the withdrawal of American forces.
A copy of Edelman's response, dated July 16, was obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.
"Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia," Edelman wrote…
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CLINTON_IRAQ?SITE=CALAK&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
Go to Iraq and fight, Mr President
Bush’s latest choice of scapegoat — Hillary Clinton — boggles the mind
By Keith Olbermann, Countdown
July 19, 2007
It is one of the great, dark, evil lessons, of history.
A country — a government — a military machine — can screw up a war seven ways to Sunday. It can get thousands of its people killed. It can risk the safety of its citizens. It can destroy the fabric of its nation.
But as long as it can identify a scapegoat, it can regain or even gain power.
The Bush administration has opened this Pandora’s Box about Iraq. It has found its scapegoats: Hillary Clinton and us.
The lies and terror tactics with which it deluded this country into war — they had nothing to do with the abomination that Iraq has become. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.
The selection of the wrong war, in the wrong time, in the wrong place — the most disastrous geopolitical tactic since Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia in 1914 and destroyed itself in the process — that had nothing to do with the overwhelming crisis Iraq has become. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.
The criminal lack of planning for the war — the total “jump-off-a-bridge-and-hope-you-can-fly” tone to the failure to anticipate what would follow the deposing of Saddam Hussein — that had nothing to do with the chaos in which Iraq has been enveloped. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.
The utter, blinkered idiocy of “staying the course,” of sending Americans to Iraq and sending them a second time, and a third and a fourth, until they get killed or maimed — the utter de-prioritization of human life, simply so a politician can avoid having to admit a mistake — that had nothing to do with the tens of thousand individual tragedies darkening the lives of American families, forever. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.
The continuing, relentless, remorseless, corrupt and cynical insistence that this conflict somehow is defeating or containing or just engaging the people who attacked us on 9/11, the total “Alice Through the Looking Glass” quality that ignores that in Iraq, we have made the world safer for al-Qaida — it isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault!
The fault, brought down, as if a sermon from this mount of hypocrisy and slaughter by a nearly anonymous undersecretary of defense, has tonight been laid on the doorstep of... Sen. Hillary Clinton and, by extension, at the doorstep of every American — the now-vast majority of us — who have dared to criticize this war or protest it or merely ask questions about it…
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19859124/
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