Year: 2003

Why is this not big news? It’s an AP report, after all.

CLOSING IN II? Encouraging news from Iraq about Saddam’s increasing isolation.

The Los Angeles Times, clearly concerned about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lead in the polls, unleashes an astonishing piece of reporting invective against him. This reeks of a politically motivated smear-job. All of these women were sought out by the Times itself. None came forward at the time or subsequently. And although the behavior is, to my mind, gross and offensive, it doesn’t rise to the level of legal sexual harrassment; and no legal action has been sought. Moreover, four of the six women are anonymous. So a candidate now has to answer charges about his private life leveled for the most part by anonymous accusers, sought out by a newspaper that is campaigning against his candidacy and that waited a week before the recall to unload the details. The press just keeps getting classier, doesn’t it? (Bonus points to Mickey for predicting the Times’ anti-Arnold shoe-drop strategy. He was ahead of the curve by one day, 2 hours and 26 minutes. In the blogosphere, that’s an eternity. Mazel Tov. He’d get even more points if it weren’t so frigging predictable.)

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post use their news pages to promote the idea of an independent counsel. It’s the only way to keep this story at the top of the page for Day Four. The predictability of all this sinks in. The administration should simply accede now rather than later, it seems to me. In the way that such scandals operate, this will be used by the Dems to do all they can to trash the liberation of Iraq, undermine any thought that Iraq had WMDs, and generally try to hammer this president. You can see why they have seized this opportunity. It’s a big break; and they’d be crazy in purely partisan terms not to exploit it. All of which is to say that if anyone in the administration did this stupid, petty, criminal thing, he or she deserves everything they get.

There is also something surreal about the whole event. This, after all, is about telephone conversations which one party will almost certainly deny and the other party likely won’t reveal. What are the odds that we will ever find out anything for sure whoever investigates? Even a pissed-off third party in the CIA or White House can’t prove what was said in such telephone conversations. And doesn’t everyone involved in this – including those calling for an independent counsel – know this already? The point, then, is to besmirch what has so far been a relatively scandal-free administration, with little chance of our actually finding out what actually happened and why, and maybe get a resignation or two if you’re lucky. A kind of perfect Washington storm – about something that will never formally become much more than nothing. I could be wrong, of course; and it doesn’t mean the investigation shouldn’t take place. But it does make it all seem a little ritualistic.

AND WHY? Like many others, I’m still baffled by the rationale. Okay, so let’s say it’s meant to intimidate other potential CIA dissidents. How was this information conveyed exactly? I mean: can you imagine what was actually said in the phone call? “Hi, Dana. This is Karl. You know that guy Wilson who gave us such grief over Niger? Maybe you’d be interested to know that his wife’s an undercover CIA agent.” So? Why are you telling me this? What’s that got to do with anything? The only thought that makes any sense to me is if someone in the administration was trying to placate neo-con or conservative reporters or pundits, who were miffed that such a partisan lefty as Wilson was deputed to investigate Saddam’s ties to African uranium in the first place. “Well, Brit, his wife’s an expert in WMDs at the CIA. She knows a lot about the region and the subject and it seemed a good idea at the time.” That’s the only way I can think of such info being slipped into the conversation. Maybe the leaker knew she was undercover; maybe he didn’t. I’d guess the latter, mainly because I find it hard top believe that anyone in this White House would be either so stupid or so petty. In other words, it was a malevolent leak but not a self-consciously criminal one. Look, I don’t know. I’m just trying to make sense of this. Right now, I’m going to stop speculating and wait for an actual new, live, breathing fact before weighing in again.

Are the Dems backing off a little? One thing this Washington Post profile strongly suggests: this guy is a world class meshuggena pain in the ass. The more he gets on television, the better for Bush.

I haven’t linked to Bob Novak’s column today. In case you haven’t read it, here it is. To my mind, the key points he makes are that he doesn’t believe that this was a coordinated leak (which doesn’t bear on its illegality); and that its investigation is a routine one:

The Justice Department investigation was not requested by CIA Director George Tenet. Any leak of classified information is routinely passed by the Agency to Justice, averaging one a week. This investigative request was made in July shortly after the column was published. Reported only last weekend, the request ignited anti-Bush furor.

Interesting.

Some readers have argued that Larry Johnson’s description of Plame as having worked undercover “for three decades” could have meant that she had been active in the 1980s, 1990s and the current decade, which is just possible if she started in her mid-20s. So Johnson might have meant – “in the last three decades.” Well, Johnson can easily clear that one up, can’t he? Stay tuned.

They agree with the Wall Street Journal. The British anti-war paper simply asserts that the only suspect in the Plame affair is Karl Rove. They don’t mention either the White House’s clear denial or even Joseph Wilson’s back-tracking on it. More evidence that this may indeed be the point of the whole exercise. But it remains the case that if a crime has been committed, a crime has been committed, whoever is responsible.

Drudge pulls together an obvious discrepancy. Former CIA guy Larry Johnson claimed on PBS’ Newshour last night that he had worked with Valerie Plame as an undercover agent for thirty years. But she’s forty. That’s some early recruitment. Here’s what we can say for sure: whenever she was recruited, outing her was criminal and wrong. But everything else looks murkier and murkier. Obviously, I deeply suspect Joseph Wilson. He’s a guy happily calling pro-war types “right-wing crazies” well before the war, yet is asked to perform a critical intelligence mission for the Bushies. How? Why? The WSJ has a good point on this, although I find their dismissal of the basic charge to be gratuitously partisan. It would be nice if an editorial board like the Journal’s, that pioneered all sorts of (often worthy) investigations into the Clintons, could work up a smidgen of concern that someone’s CIA cover had been illegally blown.

It’s getting clearer. Valerie Plame was undercover and her outing was apparently deliberate and coordinated. If this pans out, it really is an outrageous piece of political malice. I may have misjudged this one at first, because I couldn’t quite see the motive behind it. I’m still not totally clear, and it seems an extremely dumb and self-defeating tactic to me. But whatever the motive, if this is the nub of the story, the leakers need to be found, fired and prosecuted. I’ve written that before. But, listening to the Newshour testimony, my outrage level just went up a notch.

McCLINTOCK’S AIDE: A disturbing story in the Los Angeles Times about one John Stoos, former chief legislative aide and now deputy campaign chairman of Tim McClintock’s campaign for California governor. Stoos is a Christian Reconstructionist, who believes that the Constitution should be subordinate to what he calls Biblical law. He writes regularly for the Chalcedon Report, a far-right “Christian” publication. Stoos, like many such extremists, doesn’t much care for non-Christian Jews or gays. McClintock hasn’t fired him. Where does the Republican party find these kooks? And why hasn’t there been a bigger stnk about this? Or does everyone know that California’s GOP has become infiltrated with theocratic nut-jobs? One more reason to vote for Arnold. You cannot trust the Republican social right.