[Mb-civic] It's a small-minded world after all

[Jef Bek]

Posted on Sun, Jul. 17, 2005
 
It's a small-minded world after all

By Jim Wright
Special to the Star-Telegram

As in the sordid revelations that brought down the Nixon administration in
1973, one of the saddest aspects of the secret White House calls that outed
special agent Valerie Plame Wilson is the sheer pettiness of the scheme.

Now that top white House political adviser Karl Rove himself has been
identified as one who initiated a call to Time magazine, identifying Joseph
Wilson's wife as a secret CIA agent, the stupid venture takes on a new
dimension of apparent officialdom.

It wasn't just some crackpot, low-level zealot who mischievously took it on
himself to embarrass Wilson and his wife. It was deliberate policy!

And for what? Why would anyone of Rove's level consider it worth risking
serious censure for violating an unambiguous law? Just to punish, hurt,
disadvantage or discredit two civil servants?

Was it worth it? Was Wilson's professional conclusion that Saddam Hussein
never tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger so damning that it required
this kind of heavy-handed retaliation against Wilson's family?

One other question: Is it even possible that Rove was unaware of the law
prohibiting the knowing public disclosure of a covert U.S. agent?

That law is not unclear. Under penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a
$50,000 fine, it forbids anyone with authorized access to classified
information from intentionally disclosing the identity of covert agents.

Congress passed that law in 1982 after the violent death of an undercover
agent who'd been fingered to our Cold War opposition by a disgruntled
American who maliciously published the agent's name and location, along with
those of several other secret U.S. operatives.

Nobody thinks the White House would wish any such lamentable fate for
Valerie Wilson (or Plame, if you prefer her professional name).

Rove reportedly says he didn't speak her actual name to the Time reporter,
referring to her simply as "Wilson's wife."

Yet it wasn't just an accidental slip of the tongue that blew this secret
agent's cover. It was a deliberate plan concocted by a person or persons in
the White House to try to embarrass or discredit the former ambassador.

Calls went out (whether from Rove or other functionaries) not only to Time
but also to columnist Bob Novak, reporter Judith Miller of The New York
Times and who knows what other scoop-hungry journalists, all planting the
story that the ambassador's wife was an undercover CIA agent.

Surely the White House wasn't trying to get Valerie Wilson shot. But the
leakers did not blanch at destroying her usefulness to the country and thus
ruining her career.

And why that? Well, we can only speculate. But it seems fairly obvious,
doesn't it?

Soon after everyone began awakening to the truth that Iraq had no WMDs (our
initial justification for the pre-emptive U.S. invasion), the ambassador's
official investigation had revealed that Saddam's reported nuclear intrigue
with Niger was only another exaggerated scare.

This whole flap was, on its face, a rather clumsy effort to sully and
discredit the reputations of Wilson and his wife.

And to what end? A blunt warning to others in government that, if they value
their careers, they'd better check their independent judgment at the door
and get with the program? (When we say there are WMDs, then find WMDs! Are
you on the team or not?)

All this is painfully reminiscent of the Nixon days. The Enemies List. The
tawdry break-ins at the Democratic headquarters, and at a private
psychiatrist's office to scoop up personal files of a man who opposed the
Vietnam War. The use of federal agencies -- the FBI and the IRS -- to hound
and harass private citizens who disagreed with the administration.

No, this one leaking incident doesn't rise to that level. Some say, "Tempest
in a teapot," or "Small potatoes."

Still, President Bush would do himself and the country a favor if he'd
insist that everyone in the White House read the transcript of the 1973
House Judiciary Committee debate on the Nixon administration's "dirty
tricks."

It is a recitation of petty things that, taken together, dealt with grand
principle. The principle is that the powers of government are a sacred
trust, never to be employed to punish or embarrass one's domestic political
opponents.

The very pettiness of the deed itself is, and should be, an embarrassment to
us all.
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Jim Wright is a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. PO Box
1413 Fort Worth, TX 76101