Bush White House faces criminal investigation over Iraq smear campaign

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/oct2003/cia-o01.shtml

By Patrick Martin

1 October 2003

The Bush White House has taken on the aspect of a besieged fortress with
the announcement late Monday of a formal FBI investigation into illegal
leaks of information by administration officials attempting to intimidate
a critic of Bush’s Iraq war policy. The full panoply of a Washington
scandal is unfolding: charges of conspiracy, criminal referrals,
subpoenas, orders to halt the shredding of documents and the deleting of
emails, demands for the appointment of a special or independent prosecutor
to investigate the charges.

As always in such a political eruption, it is necessary to examine both
the specific and peculiar form taken by the “scandal” and the more
profound underlying causes. In the current conflict, unlike the countless
investigations of the Clinton White House fomented by its extreme-right
critics, on trumped-up charges, there is an actual crime, one of
considerable political significance.

The Washington Post ignited the firestorm with an article posted on its
web site on the night of Saturday, September 27, reporting that two Bush
administration officials had contacted a half dozen reporters in July,
seeking to spread a story to discredit former ambassador Joseph A. Wilson,
a prominent critic of Bush’s Iraq policy.

Wilson is a retired diplomat who traveled early in 2002 to Niger, in West
Africa, on a mission for the CIA to investigate intelligence reports that
Iraq was seeking to obtain hundreds of tons of uranium ore from that
country for use in a nuclear weapons program. As a former diplomat who had
served both in Baghdad and in Niamey, the capital of Niger, Wilson was an
obvious choice for the task. He made an eight-day visit and reported that
it was impossible for Iraq to get uranium from Niger and that there was no
evidence of any attempt.

When President Bush, nearly a year later, included the Africa uranium
claim in his State of the Union speech, Wilson protested vocally, first
within the Washington national security establishment, then publicly, in
an op-ed column July 6 in the New York Times. The Bush administration was
seriously embarrassed; the White House admitted that the claim had been
false; and CIA Director George Tenet issued a public statement taking
responsibility for the false information being included in a presidential
address.

Within a few days of Wilson’s column, Bush administration officials were
leaking to selected reporters the information that his wife, Valerie
Plame, was a longtime CIA operative, claiming that she had engineered his
selection for the Niger mission and suggesting that this represented some
sort of corrupt practice. One of the journalists, longtime right-wing
pundit Robert Novak, made Plame’s name and occupation public in his
syndicated column July 14.

Plame is reportedly a former covert operative now working for the CIA as
an analyst in the field of weapons of mass destruction. She has traveled
to the Middle East on CIA business while playing the role of an energy
industry expert. Friends and colleagues of Plame have told the press that
anyone who met with her overseas will now be under suspicion of working
for American intelligence, and that many lives could be endangered by her
exposure as a CIA agent.

Any US government official who revealed Plame’s identity to the press
would be guilty of violating the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection
Act, legislation passed under the Reagan administration to put a stop to
the exposures made by former agent Philip Agee and other opponents of CIA
undercover operations. It is ironic that the first person to be prosecuted
under this reactionary law, passed to protect the criminal actions of the
American spy agency, could be a high official of the Bush administration.


A conflict within the state

There are many similarities between the latest Washington scandal and the
conflict in Britain triggered by the suicide of David Kelly, the British
government scientist who had leaked information to the BBC critical of the
Blair government’s reckless drive to war in Iraq, and was subsequently
hounded to his death. Blair has been forced to authorize a public inquiry,
headed by Justice Brian Hutton, in an attempt to control and ultimately
suppress the scandal. Despite the best efforts of Blair and Hutton, the
inquiry has revealed enormous tensions and divisions within the state
machine, and further discredited the Blair government in the eyes of
working people.

The conflict in Washington has erupted in the aftermath of the US conquest
of Iraq, as it has become clear that the occupation is a military,
political and economic debacle for American imperialism. Tensions within
the national security apparatus are breaking through to the surface—
witness the scathing denunciation of Bush’s war policy last month by
retired general Anthony Zinni, the former commander of the US Central
Command and once Bush’s personal envoy in the Israeli-Palestinian talks.

The warmongering cabal in the Bush White House struck out at Wilson for
his exposure of the Africa uranium lie. As Wilson said later, the leak was
part of “a deliberate attempt on the part of the White House to intimidate
others and make them think twice about coming forward.”

John Dean, the former White House counsel in the Nixon administration,
commented that the leaking of Mrs. Wilson’s name and occupation was worse
than any of Nixon’s crimes. “If I thought I had seen dirty political
tricks as nasty and vile as they could get at the Nixon White House, I was
wrong,” he wrote last month. “Nixon never set up a hit on one of his
enemies’ wives.”

In retaliation, the “high Bush administration official” who was the source
of the Washington Post report—widely believed to be CIA Director George
Tenet or another top official of that agency—released information that
could well trigger a high-level purge within the White House.

According to the Post account, the senior official said that the exposure
of Wilson’s wife “was meant purely and simply for revenge.” Such leaks
were “wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and
did nothing to diminish Wilson’s credibility.” The official revealed the
leaking, but refused to name either the leakers or the journalists whose
collaboration they sought.

The most immediate target of press speculation was Bush’s top political
adviser and right-wing hatchet man, Karl Rove. Wilson directly attacked
the longtime Republican Party operative at a public forum August 21 near
Seattle, where he said he was interested “to see whether or not we can get
Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.”

The Bush administration is confronted with a full-blown political crisis
that could well produce such a spectacle. Bureaucratic foot-dragging
delayed the formal opening of an investigation for months. According to
press reports, the CIA approached the Justice Department about an
investigation within a week of the publication of Novak’s column, and by
the end of July had drafted a “crime report,” the formal notice that a
crime had been committed. But it was not until September 29 that the
Justice Department authorized the FBI to begin a criminal investigation.

Then followed a curious sequence of events. The Justice Department
officially notified the White House of the upcoming investigation on
Monday evening, about 8 p.m. White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales did
not relay the notice to the White House staff until the following morning,
in a brief memo instructing them to “preserve all materials that might in
any way be related to the department’s investigation.” The White House
made public the text of these instructions in an effort to show that it
was cooperating. The media did not make any mention of the timing of these
actions: the 12-hour gap between notification by the Justice Department
and Gonzales’s memo gave White House aides plenty of time to sanitize
their records before FBI agents descended upon them.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters, “The president
has directed the White House to cooperate fully with this investigation.”
But he said that no White House aides would be asked directly whether they
were the source of the leaks. He denied that Rove was involved,
adding, “The president knows he wasn’t involved.” How Bush could know
this, if the policy was not to ask, McClellan did not explain.

The other major actor in the Washington crisis is the media itself. While
Novak was the only one of the six journalists contacted by the White House
to serve as a conduit for the leak, none of the others—apparently
including reporters for NBC, CBS and ABC—made public the fact that the
White House was engaged in a smear campaign against its critics. Since the
FBI investigation was made public, no journalist has come forward to
identify the two high officials who engaged in this criminal action.

Wilson himself said that four reporters working at the three major
television networks had told him they received calls as part of the smear,
and he identified one of them as Andrea Mitchell of NBC (Mitchell is also
the wife of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, the head of the
US central bank).

In a particularly chilling note, Wilson cited the comment of one
reporter “who called me right after he had spoken to Rove and said that
Rove had said my wife was fair game.” Wilson said that conversation took
place July 21, one week after the Novak column appeared.

The revelations so far give a glimpse of the gangster mentality in the
White House, but a full exposure would require a wide-ranging public
investigation into the entire conduct of the war against Iraq, from its
original conception in the minds of Bush administration officials—who
began planning it long before the September 11 terrorist attacks supplied
them with a pretext.

It goes without saying that no such investigation will be conducted by the
FBI and John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, or by any other agency of the
American state. This includes the Congress, where leading Democrats have
already called for hearings and the appointment of a special prosecutor.

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