Bush
Approved Security Leak
By Patrick Martin
08 April 2006
World
Socialist Web
The
revelation that President Bush personally approved the release of highly
classified information to retaliate against a critic of the Iraq war
is a major political event. Once again, the modus operandi of this government
is revealed: distortion, falsification, manipulation of the media, secretive
methods, dirty tricks, all to defend its ongoing criminal enterprise,
the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The source of this exposure
is a 39-page document filed late Wednesday night by US Attorney Patrick
Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the Bush administration
campaign to punish former ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly challenging
the principal pretext for the invasion of Iraq, the claim that Saddam
Hussein was on the verge of achieving a nuclear weapons capability that
would allow him to slip an atomic bomb to Al Qaeda.
Wilson was sent to Niger
in 2002 at the behest of the CIA to investigate claims that Iraq had
sought to purchase uranium in the African country to use in a secret
nuclear weapons program. He found no evidence to support the allegation,
but the charge nonetheless made its appearance in a CIA National Intelligence
Estimate released just before the October 2002 congressional vote to
authorize war against Iraq, and repeated in Bush’s 2003 State
of the Union speech. When Wilson went public with his rebuttal, in an
op-ed column in a July 6, 2003 New York Times, Bush administration officials
retaliated by leaking to the media the fact that his wife, Valerie Plame
Wilson, was a covert CIA officer involved in counter-proliferation efforts.
Last fall, Fitzgerald obtained
a criminal indictment against I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney’s
chief of staff, for committing perjury and obstruction of justice by
lying to the grand jury hearing evidence on the Wilson affair. In particular,
Libby was charged with denying that he had revealed to the press that
Plame was a covert CIA operative, when he had actually given this information
to several journalists.
The court filing places the
exposure of Valerie Plame in the context of a broader campaign by the
White House in response to Wilson’s criticism of the decision
to go to war in Iraq. It cites admissions by Libby that Cheney “advised
him that the President had authorized” the release of classified
information about the war to journalists who could be trusted to parrot
the administration line.
The first such administration
stooge was Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter, and notorious
as a conduit for Bush administration propaganda about alleged weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq. Libby arranged a private meeting with Miller
at a Washington hotel where he told her of Plame’s identity as
a CIA agent.
The purpose was twofold:
to discredit Wilson by suggesting that his trip—to one of the
world’s poorest countries—was some sort of junket engineered
by his wife; and to punish the couple by putting an end to Plame’s
career as a covert agent (as well as potentially threatening her safety).
In the event, Miller did not write the desired article, but another
administration mouthpiece, syndicated columnist Robert Novak, did the
job in a column published July 14, 2003. It was this column which triggered
the Fitzgerald investigation.
According to the prosecutor,
Libby expressed some concerns about the legality of the leaking, but
was reassured by Cheney that “the President had specially authorized
defendant to disclose certain information.” This included excerpts
of a highly classified CIA National Intelligence Estimate, delivered
to the White House in October 2002, whose purpose was to make the case
for war with Iraq by deliberately exaggerating and even falsifying Iraq’s
alleged WMD capabilities.
It was this NIE that was
the basis of Condoleezza Rice’s panic-mongering assertion that
the United States faced the danger of “a mushroom cloud”
if there was not immediate action to oust Saddam Hussein. It was also
cited by numerous Democratic congressmen and senators, including Hillary
Clinton and John Kerry, as the justification for their vote to give
Bush the authority to go to war.
Lewis Libby resigned his
government position immediately after the indictment. In the months
since then, his attorneys have faced a difficult struggle to construct
a defense, since Libby’s sworn testimony to the grand jury was
so obviously a lie. He had told the panel that he had not conveyed classified
information about Plame’s CIA role to any journalist, only discussed
with several journalists suggestions that were being floated in the
press. These denials directly contradicted both the testimony of the
journalists and documentary evidence uncovered by Fitzgerald, showing
that Libby requested and received classified briefings that included
Plame’s identity and job description during the month before his
meeting with Miller.
The Fitzgerald document exposes
a devastating contradiction in Libby’s defense. His attorneys
have been claiming that he misstated and concealed his role in leaking
Plame’s name and occupation to the media because he forgot the
matter in the rush of far more significant affairs of state. But according
to Fitzgerald, Libby told the grand jury that it was highly unusual,
even unique, for him to receive an instruction from Bush, relayed by
Cheney, to leak classified Iraq intelligence to the New York Times.
How then was it possible to forget?
The real purpose of Libby’s
claim of political amnesia was to justify subpoenaing a huge number
of sensitive White House documents—allegedly to “refresh
his memory”—which the White House would refuse to release,
thus resulting in the case being thrown out on the grounds that Libby
was being denied his right to an effective defense. Similar methods
were employed during the Iran-Contra investigation, when the Reagan
White House conducted an elaborate minuet with attorneys for former
top intelligence and national security officials, using this tactic,
called “graymail,” to insure their effective immunity from
prosecution.
In wake of Fitzgerald’s
revelations, the legal position of both Bush and Cheney is in considerable
jeopardy. Both Bush and Cheney gave sworn testimony to the grand jury;
if they denied their role in instigating the anti-Wilson campaign—as
both did in public statements during the two-year investigation—they
could face charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, similar to
those facing Libby.
Then there is the matter
of the leaking itself. The White House claims that Bush has the legal
authority as “commander-in-chief” to declassify any material
he pleases. That doesn’t constitute leaking, one spokesman said,
but rather “sharing with the public.”
Coming from an administration
which already claims “commander-in-chief” authority to arrest
and jail American citizens indefinitely, kidnap and “render”
selected individuals of any nationality to CIA-run torture centers,
operate a concentration camp at the Guantánamo Bay naval base,
and even commit murder, the unauthorized release of documents might
perhaps be considered only a secondary offense.
From a political standpoint,
however, the offense is major, and perhaps even fatal. Certainly in
any halfway democratic country, the exposure of official misconduct
and lying on the scale of the Wilson affair would bring down the government,
especially one as unpopular and isolated as the Bush administration,
whose approval rating in the latest AP-Ipsos poll fell to a low of 36
percent.
But in the United States
of 2006, the administration stands virtually unchallenged, because the
ruling elite has essentially abandoned democratic methods of rule and
the official bourgeois opposition, the Democratic Party, functions as
an opposition only in a purely nominal sense.
Press reports of the Fitzgerald
document produced the usual howls of pretended outrage and ritualistic
fist-shaking from the Democrats. They criticized Bush for hypocritically
denouncing leaks while engaging in the practice himself. But for the
most part, their comments were focused on the damage to the morale of
the intelligence agencies and the loss of credibility the next time
a US administration cries “wolf” over WMD, notably, now
in Iran.
In other words, the real
content of the Democratic Party critique was an attack on Bush from
the right. The Democrats cannot say what so obviously is—that
the war in Iraq is the product of a criminal conspiracy to deceive the
American people and trample on the rights of the Iraqi people. That
is because they have long been the accomplices and junior partners of
the Bush administration in perpetrating this crime.