Neo-Conned! Again
Page 69
The Run-Up To War
During the summer of 2002, the Bush administration put the Iraq war plan on the front burner. Yet there was significant resistance to a U.S. military invasion to oust Saddam Hussein. On August 15, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, the alter ego of former President George H.W. Bush, and the chairman of G. W. Bush's President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), penned an op-ed, warning that an invasion of Iraq would be unjustified, and would constitute a major disruption of the War on Terror. Former Bush Sr. Secretary of State, James Baker III, penned a similar piece on August 26.
In response, Vice President Cheney personally launched a counter-offensive in late August. Speaking at the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) in Nashville, Tennessee, Cheney asserted, “… we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.” Throughout the autumn of 2002, other senior Bush administration officials picked up the Cheney line that Saddam had to be stopped before his quest for weapons of mass destruction resulted in a nuclear mushroom cloud.
Cheney may have ignored Wilson's findings, but the CIA did not. When President Bush scheduled a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, for October 7, 2002, and intended to reference Saddam's alleged attempt to acquire “500 metric tons of uranium oxide from … Africa,” Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet challenged its accuracy, and the statement was removed from the speech.
Despite the serious CIA and DIA reservations about the Niger yellowcake allegations, neoconservative hardliners in the Bush administration continued to press their “Big Lie” campaign. In December 2002, the U.S. State Department issued a fact sheet in response to Iraq's 20,000-page submission to the United Nations Security Council on the status of its WMD programs. The State Department document critiqued the fact that Iraq's “Declaration [to the UN] ignore[d] efforts to procure uranium from Niger,” and the fact sheet further asked, “Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?” Perhaps not surprisingly, it has since come to light – via a State Department Inspector General chronology provided to the House Committee on Government Reform – that John Bolton, former under secretary of state for arms control and international security, tasked the Bureau of Non-proliferation, a subordinate office to his own, with preparing the document, in spite of the fact that State denied his participation in a letter to Congressman Henry A. Waxman on September 25, 2003.
The proverbial crap hit the fan in late January 2003, when President Bush, in his State of the Union address, cited British intelligence sources to assert that Iraq was attempting to obtain uranium from Africa to build a bomb. Dr. Robert Joseph, a Richard Perle neocon protégé on the National Security Council staff, had pressed the CIA's Weapons Inspection, Non-proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) for acceptable wording to promote the widely discredited notion that Saddam was well advanced in his quest to obtain a nuclear bomb. The result was the infamous “16 words”: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Joe Wilson heard President Bush's State of the Union address and was, according to his own book-length account, stunned that the President was still promoting the African yellowcake allegations nearly a year after Wilson's mission to Niger. Wilson knew that at least three other African states were capable of producing yellowcake uranium precursor, and therefore concluded that Bush was not necessarily referring to the Niger allegations. But to be on the safe side, he made a series of discreet inquiries to former State Department colleagues and people at the CIA who had sent him to Africa. Thanks to the controversy sparked by President Bush's State of the Union speech, the CIA, which had all along been skeptical of the Iraq-Niger yellowcake story, now, belatedly set out to trace the origins of the tale.
As it turned out, someone at the Niger embassy in Rome had passed documents to the Italian security service, SISMI allegedly detailing Iraqi efforts to procure the large quantity of yellowcake uranium precursor covertly. SISMI had then informed the U.S., British, and other intelligence services about the contents of the documents.
Now, in early 2003, the CIA first obtained copies of the documents, and, eventually, the originals. Parenthetically, the Italian magazine Panorama, owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, had obtained copies of the documents and shared them with the U.S. embassy in Rome. Upon closer inspection, the Panorama reporter and her editor decided not to publish a story, due to their own skepticism about the documents' authenticity.
Shortly after obtaining the original documents, the CIA made them available to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations agency leading the on-the-ground search for Iraq's nuclear weapons program. On March 7, 2003, even as the Bush administration was putting the final forces in place for the invasion of Iraq, IAEA head Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei delivered devastating public testimony in front of the United Nations Security Council, in effect pronouncing Iraq free of any nuclear weapons program, secret or otherwise. Dr. ElBaradei also announced that a brief analysis of the Niger documents revealed that they were shoddy forgeries: “The IAEA has concluded,” he said, “with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents … are not in fact authentic.”
At this point, Wilson took his first public step. In an interview with CNN, 24 hours after Dr. ElBaradei's UN testimony, he made a veiled reference to his own Niger mission. He suggested that if the Bush-Cheney White House did a review of their own files, they would find that they already had evidence discrediting the Niger yellowcake tale.
Within days of Wilson's CNN appearance, a well-placed source reported, a meeting took place in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney to assess the Wilson allegations and map out a counter-attack. A “get Joe Wilson” team was activated to profile the former diplomat – and his family. That March 2003 meeting (occurring on the 8th or 9th) unleashed the chain of events that now is the subject of a Federal grand jury probe, headed by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.
As of this writing (in July 2005), Fitzgerald has, for more than 18 months, been investigating whether senior Bush officials knowingly leaked the name of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. The seeming lack of progress may be due in part to the fact that Fitzgerald, in addition to being special counsel, retains his job as U.S. attorney for the northern district of Illinois. It is a position that, according to John Dean, former White House general counsel in the Nixon administration, who has been following the
Plame leak, “is typically a very demanding full-time job.” Moreover, Dean points out that federal regulations state that a special counsel “shall be selected from outside the United States Government,” a restriction that would clearly preclude the selection of an active U.S. attorney, who ultimately reports to the attorney general. “Those Justice Department regulations had a purpose,” Dean put it, “and it was to avoid conflicts of interest and divided loyalties. Now, we are stuck with both.”
The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller IV (D-W. Va.), tried to get the FBI to conduct an investigation of the Niger uranium document forgery itself. On March 14, 2003, he wrote to the director of the FBI with the hope that such an investigation would help “allay any concerns” as to who was involved in preparing the forged documents. He expressed particular concern over “the possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.” Rockefeller's Republican counterpart, Pat Roberts of Kansas, did not sign the letter, indicating to the press through a spokeswoman that while the Senate Intelligence Committee would look into the forgery, it would be “inappropriate for the FBI to investigate at this point.” The committee did eventually look at the Niger uranium issue in conjunction with the larger WMD intelligence investigation ordered on July 7, 2004. The report resulting from that investigation even included “additional views” of Senators Roberts, Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and Christopher Bond (R-Mo.) on Joe Wilson's role
in the discussion of the Niger uranium documents, in which they complained of his “media blitz” and the many statements he made that, they alleged, “had no basis in fact.” Their “additional” findings were far from uncontested, though. Joe Wilson replied to some of them in a letter published at Salon.com (among other places) on July 16, 2004, in which he strongly refuted the assertions they made.
Two days after Rockefeller's letter to the FBI, Cheney asserted, in an interview on Meet the Press, that ElBaradei was frankly “wrong.” He also attacked the IAEA's record on Iraq. In what was later explained away as a slip of the tongue, Cheney openly charged that Saddam Hussein had “reconstituted nuclear weapons.” He also assured the American people that U.S. soldiers would be greeted by the Iraqi people as liberators, and that the regular Iraqi army and even portions of the Republican Guard would simply “step aside.”
Then on July 6, 2003, Joe Wilson penned an op-ed in the New York Times, in which he recounted his Niger mission and criticized the Bush administration for rushing to war on the basis of shoddy information. The op-ed was a shot heard round the world. Wilson appeared on scores of TV shows and gave many more radio and print interviews. His decision to surface publicly with his criticism of the Bush administration's “Big Lie” campaign to justify the Iraq invasion was the catalyst for a much larger dissent, further fueled by the intensification of the insurgency against the American occupation of Iraq.
Eight days after the Wilson New York Times op-ed appeared – and three days after George Tenet admitted that the 16 words “did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches” – Chicago Sun-Times syndicated columnist Robert Novak penned a story, “outing” Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA officer, citing two unnamed “senior White House sources.” Under a 1980s law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (50 U.S.C. §421 et seq.), it is a felony crime for any government official to reveal publicly the identity of an undercover U.S. intelligence officer, punishable by a maximum jail sentence of 10 years and a substantial fine.
From the moment the Novak column appeared, it has been in the power of President George W. Bush to get to the bottom of the sordid affair. He not only chose not to find out the identities of the leakers and banish them from his administration, he also cavalierly told reporters he did not expect to be able to identify the sources of the leak.
Perhaps no single event since the arrest of Jonathan Pollard for indulging in “friendly” espionage for Israel so angered the professional intelligence community. According to several current and former CIA officers I interviewed, CIA Director George Tenet was warned that, if he did not pressure the Justice Department to open a full investigation into the Plame leak, the Bush administration would be hit with a string of highly damaging leaks about White House interference in the intelligence process. The Justice Department, then under the direction of John Ashcroft, stalled on even opening an investigation for months. But still more months passed, however, before the Attorney General recused himself and allowed a special counsel to be appointed by the Deputy Attorney General, Robert Comey. As an aside, it's interesting to note that on June 3, 2004, a White House spokesman confirmed that President Bush consulted with a non-government attorney, who the President indicated he would retain, should it be necessary to do so, for advice in the Plame case. A lawyer that John Dean spoke to suggested that this move almost certainly indicates the President has some knowledge of the issue. “It would not seem that the President needs to consult personal counsel, thereby preserving the attorney-client privilege, if he has no knowledge about the leak,” the lawyer told Dean.
Personally, I have no doubt that the Valerie Plame leak was an act of political treachery hatched in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney – with his tacit or explicit authorization. I have no doubt that “senior officials” in Dick Cheney's office, including Lewis Libby, John Hannah, and David Wurmser, know precisely what was done. There is good reason to believe that several members of the Defense Policy Board, formerly chaired by Richard Perle, also have intimate knowledge of the sequence of events leading to the publication of the Novak story.
A colleague and I contacted Perle, James Woolsey, Kenneth Adelman, and Helmut Sonnenfeldt to determine whether any of them had participated in discussions about Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame prior to the Novak article. Sonnenfeldt told my colleague that, to his knowledge, no such discussion had taken place at a formal session of the Defense Policy Board, but he could not say, for certain, that no such discussion had occurred among board members. Woolsey responded to email queries by denying that the board had even met during the summer of 2003; however, the query concerned meetings that would have taken place between March and June of 2003. When he was asked to respond about meetings prior to July, he refused to comment.
As of June 2005, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald had reportedly completed much of the substantive investigative work. Over the course of his investigation, I am told, Patrick Fitzgerald assembled a clear picture of the crime, including the pivotal role of senior officials in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. In the course of Fitzgerald's investigation, two journalists – Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of TIME Magazine – were subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury. They refused to testify on grounds that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution shielded them from having to talk about their confidential sources; Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, didn't buy that, and decided in October 2004 to hold them in contempt. He did let them stay out of jail while an appeals process worked itself out, but, as Hogan said in the courtroom at the end of June 2005 – quoting Lewis Carroll's Walrus from the sequel to Alice in Wonderland – “The time has come.” The Supreme Court refused, on June 27, 2005, to hear the journalists' appeal, following a rejection of their First Amendment argument by a three-judge panel from the D.C. Appellate Court in February, and the April rejection of their request for a full-court re-hearing. TIME turned over Cooper's notes with the hope that jail time for him would be avoided, but Judith Miller and Co. decided to play “hardball” with the court. She was sent to jail on July 6, 2005, for contempt, and could remain there through October, when the term of the grand jury in the case expires. What at first glance seems most peculiar about the reporters' relationship to the case is their willingness to take the fall to protect Bush-administration sources. (As we note below, however, it is not, perhaps, as strange as it first seems.) While they and other watchdog groups have turned this into another journalists'-rights case, the facts would seem to point in the other direction. As Fitzgerald himself told Judge Hogan in the courtroom, “This case is not about a whistleblower …. [It's] about a potential retaliation against a whistleblower.” Even Eric Burns of FOX News (of all places) said on FOX's Studio B on June 30, 2005, that he didn't understand why the two journalists were willing to take such heat, “hiding behind a principle,” just to keep the potential commission of a crime confidential, and to help cover up the alleged “dirty politics” of the Bush administration. “Why would we assume that the right of a journalist to protect sources is in all cases a more positive good,” he asked (as paraphrased by a blogger at newshounds.us), than “[t]he right of people to know if politics is being played at a dirty level?”1
Given how long it continues to take Fitzgerald to produce indictments that are assuredly forthcoming, much speculation has appeared in the media claiming that there may in fact be no crime involved in the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity. Law experts and senior intelligence community officials have assured me that this is hogwash. The appointment of Fitzgerald as an independent counsel would never have happened, I have been told, were there any doubt that a serious crime had been committed. The question facing the prosecutor is not whether a crime was committed. The question is: can he produce witnesses who will testify about the crime, beyond the details provided by Cooper's notebook? And if not, will he take on the vice
president of the United States on the basis of a circumstantial case and a pattern of forensic evidence alone? Time will tell.
What Cooper's notebook did lead to so far is a flurry of discussion surrounding the role of Karl Rove, who, we now know for sure, spoke to Cooper about Plame, though he claims not to have mentioned her name and therefore not to have “revealed” her identity. The evidence that has recently surfaced also appears to confirm that Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby was an additional source of the leak to Novak, besides whatever Rove may have provided. Both men were part of a White House “plumbers unit” called the White House Iraq Group, which was formed by Presidential Chief of Staff Andrew Card in August 2002, expressly to lead the propaganda offensive to win support for the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government.1
Existence of the WHIG was not lost on Independent Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. In one of the first subpoenas he issued, in January 2004, he demanded the records of the WHIG, during the period of the Wilson oped and the outing of his wife. Fitzgerald also demanded telephone records from the White House and from the President's jet, Air Force One, during a Presidential visit to Africa. During that flight, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was accompanying the President, received a copy of a June 10, 2003, State Department memo on the “Niger yellowcake” affair, which identified “Valerie Wilson” as a CIA officer involved in work on weapons of mass destruction. The memo was delivered to Secretary Powell in the immediate aftermath of the Joe Wilson op-ed in the New York Times. Prosecutor Fitzgerald, according to news accounts, believed that the memo may have been circulated to White House staff traveling with the President and Secretary Powell, and this may have been how the information got into the hands of Rove.