Collateral damage in the Plame
game: US national security
We already know the answer. The CIA.
The Republican talking points are trying to make it look like this trip was cooked up by professional Bush-hater Joe Wilson and useful tool and spouse Valerie Plame just to make the President look bad.
Wilson has done a rather awkward job of word-parsing. He says Plame didn't arrange the trip, though she did put his name forward. That will be enough grist for the mill of the right-wing conspiracy theorists.
What is, of course, more awkward is that the conspiracy would also require the President to behave like a mendacious, war-mongering asshole and insert blatantly untrue statements in his State of the Union address months later, just so Smokin' (Gun) Joe could shoot them down.
Well, maybe that part of the conspiracy wasn't so hard, after all.
Nevertheless, the interesting fact is that the CIA authorized Wilson to go to Niger, paid his expenses, and in return got a report that delivered a rather rare commodity: the truth.
In the words of Sandra Day O'Connor (when Florida declared for Gore), "This can't be happening!"
In Bush-world the CIA's mission is to deliver intelligence product that supports policy, not provide information that shapes policy or, even worse, threatens to undercut it.
IMO, the reason Porter Goss is at the CIA: is to make sure that nothing like Plame-gate ever happens again.
No loose cannon CIA managers sending heroic, knowledgeable, and patriotic public servants to dig out embarrassing and potentially useful and significant truths.
Instead, we'll get tireless hacks, digging out half-truths and spreading smears in the service of our foreign policy goals.
When a similar situation arises, we want Katherine Harris to come back from Niger reporting she saw Saddam lounging on the beach with yellowcake stuffed in his underpants.
And you'll be sure that report finds its way straight to Dick Cheney's desk instead of getting stopped at the foyer and diverted to a dusty file cabinet in the EOB basement.
If there is any element of this story that is under-reported it is how the Plame story fits into the systematic pushback against their own intelligence services initiated by the British and U.S. governments in 2003.
It seems to be forgotten now, but at the same time Novak was cranking out his column about Plame, the media was abuzz with the tragic story of David Kelley, the British bio-weapons expert who committed suicide after being outed as the source for a BBC story that the U.K.'s WMD dossier had been "sexed" up to make it more menacing.
Knowing what we know now — and what was becoming apparent then, in the war's aftermath — i.e. that Iraq had no WMDs and secret files in Washington and London were chock-a-block with correct, pointed, and timely pre-war warnings that the decision to invade Iraq was factually, legally, and strategically bankrupt — we can look at the actions of the Bush and Blair administrations in a new light.
By summer 2003 the chickens were coming home to roost and the intelligence professionals who had been ignored and abused were itching for payback. Phones began to ring and disgruntled spooks found media outlets ready and willing to listen.
It was gut-check time for the British and U.S. democracies. Maybe we would let that whole transparent, checks-and-balances model we're promoting around the world do its stuff on our home turf.
Nah.
Instead of admitting failure of their faith-based foreign policy, Bush and Blair decided that the alternative — intelligence-based foreign policy — had to be discredited and destroyed.
First the CIA and the national defense apparatus in the UK and USA had to be put on notice that whistleblowers attempting to alert the public to the abuses of intelligence gathering, analysis, and distribution that had taken place — the Kelleys and the Wilsons — would be attacked without mercy and without regard for their careers, their characters, or even their fundamental veracity concerning the matters at dispute.
Then, with the whistleblowers silenced — and memory of Hans Blix and the U.N. inspectors expunged as if by magic from the national forebrain — an alternative version of events that placed the blame for the failures on honest disagreement, understandable post-9/11 emphasis on worst case scenarios when faced with "uncertainty", and regrettable lapses within the immense, mismanaged intelligence bureaucracy would be peddled to compliant investigatory commissions and trumpeted to the public.
Finally, at least in the United States, obedient Bush administration apparatchiks would be sent to oversee the intelligence services and ensure that unacceptable episodes of independent thinking, initiative, courage, and honesty would never be allowed to taint the precious intelligence product again.
So consider the Plame game as more than the usual expression of Rovian arrogance and malice.
Consider it as part and parcel of the Bush administration's attempt to evade responsibility for the Iraq war not only at the expense of the careers and reputations of two honorable people, but also by destroying the U.S. intelligence community as an independent, critical, and moderating force in American foreign policy.
That's the kind of collateral damage that the inside-the-beltway types who hold the key to Rove's — and America's — future should abhor.
Copyright 2005 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
