Rove Watch, Pt. 2

Exposure of Rove’s lies throws Bush White House into crisis
By Patrick Martin
WSWS

The Bush White House has been plunged into political crisis by the confirmation of widespread suspicions that chief Bush political strategist Karl Rove was one of the officials who revealed the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. The exposure of Plame was part of a “dirty tricks” campaign to discredit Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who became a prominent critic of US policy in Iraq.

Newsweek magazine provided the most recent and damning evidence of Rove’s role, which had been repeatedly denied by White House spokesmen and by Rove himself over the past two years. On Sunday night, the magazine’s web site carried the text of e-mails written by Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper recounting a confidential conversation with Rove in which Rove identified Wilson’s wife, without using her name, as a CIA agent.

The e-mails were among the documents turned over by Time magazine last week to the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, who is investigating the exposure of Plame. The magazine’s decision to turn over the documents undercut Cooper’s own refusal until then to accede to Fitzgerald’s demand that he reveal the confidential source he used for an article on the Wilson-Plame affair. Cooper ultimately agreed on July 7 to testify, after Rove’s attorney called him and released him from his pledge. A second reporter, Judith Miller of the New York Times, stood by her refusal to testify and was sent to jail the same day.

The phone conversation between Cooper and Rove took place on July 11, 2003, three days before the first press report, by columnist Robert Novak, identifying Plame as an undercover CIA operative specializing in weapons of mass destruction. The “spin” which Rove sought to give this revelation to Cooper was identical to that of Novak’s column: that Wilson’s wife had engineered his trip to Niger in 2002, where he investigated claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire large quantities of uranium from the North African country.

The claim of an intensive effort by Iraq to obtain nuclear materials was central to the Bush administration lie that it was invading Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing a nuclear bomb. Bush cited the “Africa uranium” story in his 2003 State of the Union Address.

Five months later, after the US conquest of Iraq, Wilson wrote an op-ed column in the New York Times revealing that he had investigated the uranium claims in 2002 at the request of the CIA and found they were bogus. The White House was compelled to issue a retraction of the Niger story, but within days it began leaking information to the media in an effort to discredit Wilson.

The implication of both Novak’s column and Rove’s comments to Cooper was that Wilson had not gone to Niger on a mission for top CIA officials, but on a quasi-private junket, for which his wife was responsible. There were multiple lies in this account—Valerie Plame was a CIA analyst with no authority to orchestrate such a mission, and an expenses-only visit to Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, was hardly a perk. Moreover, Wilson’s findings were reported up the chain of command at the CIA to Director George Tenet, ultimately reaching the White House.

The importance of the Newsweek report is that it confirms the thuggish and anti-democratic response of the Bush administration to political criticism. Rather than attempting to rebut the criticism by Wilson—a retired State Department official with two decades of experience in the Middle East and Africa—the White House sought to smear him as corrupt, and endanger the livelihood and possibly the physical safety of his wife.

The Rove exposure has further revealed systematic lying by Bush, Rove, White House spokesman Scott McClellan and other White House aides. McClellan was the target of a heated barrage of questions Monday at a press briefing in the White House, where reporter after reporter cited the press spokesman’s own words over the last two years flatly denying that Rove had played any role in exposing Valerie Plame, and reminded the Bush operative of Bush’s pledge to fire any official who had been involved.

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Rove Watch, Pt. 1