High School Hijinks — The White House Kind
Way back when, before the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, I used to think that if you worked in the White House, you had to be really, really smart, sort of like Josh Lyman in the TV show The West Wing. Then I got to read the tapes of Nixon and his aides talking about how to muzzle that investigation, and figured out that for all their political and PR experience, this was still a bunch of guys caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and they might as well have been on my high school student council, for all the sophistication they showed.
This past week we’ve been treated to a similar spectacle in the Scooter Libby trial. Witnesses painted a picture of a Vice President’s office so traumatized by Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s non-confirmation of Iraq’s effort to buy nuclear material in Niger, that the staff put out the equivalent of a political hit on the guy’s wife–and broke U.S. law, I believe, by outing a confidential CIA operative. Not once or twice, but all over Washington. President Bush’s former press secretary (that’s C.J. Craig for West Wing junkies) only testified after he’d wangled a grant of immunity from prosecution!
Not once did these characters show any concern about the substance of Wilson’s story–that Saddam Hussein wasn’t about to detonate a nuclear weapon. That includes the Vice President, who took an oath of office to defend the United States of America. No, instead of being happy we were not under nuclear threat, he was furious that the case for going to war was being undermined by . . . the facts.
Here’s a piece I wrote several years ago, putting this case in some historical perspective. When I wrote it, I didn’t really think we’d get a special prosecutor. I’m finding the trial both delicious and appalling. Delicious because watching allegedly principled folks turn on each other when confronted with jail time shows the real strength of this administration’s moral fibre (see my post on Martin Luther King, below); appalling because, you know, these were the people running the most powerful nation on earth–and some of them still are.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel October 5, 2003
CIA outing: Time for an apology and a special prosecutor
The Bush administration’s outing of its own employee, CIA officer Valerie Plame, is a grave — though not historically unprecedented — abuse of executive power
History, alas, demonstrates that the desire for power, or the thrill of exercising it, has strained the moral capacities of too many of our presidents.
Take Woodrow Wilson, who refused to bar Americans from the war zone before U.S. entry into World War I, even though he knew many would die. Why? Because he insisted on the rights of Americans to trade anywhere, and with anybody, despite the war and because when it came time to ask Congress for a declaration of war, it would help our claim of innocence and inflame American sentiment against the “inhumane” Germans.
Or Lyndon Johnson, so eager to announce his retaliation against the North Vietnamese that he once announced a bombing raid in time for the evening news, thus alerting enemy gunners that American bombers were on the way.
Or Richard Nixon, whose 1968 campaign staff made secret contact with the South Vietnamese president Nguyen van Thieu, successfully pressuring him to resist joining peace talks during a November bombing halt that some thought Johnson ordered to help elect Hubert Humphrey. The price? Promises of a better deal from a Nixon administration — and some portion of the more than 20,000 American soldiers who died on Nixon’s watch.
Or Ronald Reagan’s campaign, long suspected by many to have made covert overtures to the Iranians holding the American hostages to avert “an October surprise” by President Carter — a deal to return the hostages that could ensure his re-election.
The principals and their staffs in these last two episodes vigorously denied these charges. Otherwise, they could be accused of treason.
The otherwise secretive Bush administration, now wobbling between “no big deal” and “we’ll investigate our own leaks,” has treated its own intelligence community in an extraordinarily bizarre fashion, designed above all to prove its clean hands.
After the worst intelligence failure in American history — costing nearly 3,000 lives and uncountable billions of dollars on Sept. 11, 2001 — it fired no one. Why? “We couldn’t have known — we’re innocent.”
At the same time, in order to justify the Iraq war, it has mounted breathtaking political assaults on the CIA, again protesting its own innocence, this time to a dwindling core of true believers.
First, the Bush team all but ignored the CIA’s intelligence on Iraq. Then, in classic fashion, they “cooked” it to say what the vice president and national security adviser and secretary of defense wanted it to say. When that turned out to be false, they blamed it on CIA Director George Tenet.
Then, furious at former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly debunking the Niger connection, they went after his wife, exposing her identity to a half-dozen Washington journalists.
Does anyone remember Phillip Agee, the former CIA agent who named CIA officers in his book, “Inside the Company”? Widely excoriated as a traitor, Agee had his passport lifted by the government in 1979.
Deeply damaged by moles Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanson — both of whom passed names of American spies to the KGB — intelligence agencies are rightly sensitive about identities being revealed. Imagine what must be going through the minds of thousands of CIA employees, wondering if their identities, too, are up for grabs if they disagree with administration policy or have the bad luck to be married to someone who does.
What about the agencies who cooperate with us abroad? How are they going to feel about the security of their operations if their governments run afoul of the latest Bush administration political whim?
Whatever their party loyalty, leaders and governments show their real moral stripes when they use their enormous power to sacrifice their own employees and fellow citizens on the altar of political gain.
No more stonewalling. It’s time for an apology — and a special prosecutor.