David Corn (The Nation): Rove Scandal: Distractions and Disinformation

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Nation
Dated Tuesday July 19

Rove Scandal: Distractions and Disinformation
By David Corn

Now that I've been sucked into the right-wing disinformation machine, I am struck by how unrelenting it is. Cliff May posted a dumb column claiming that Joe Wilson told me on background that his wife was an undercover operative and that I was the first person to really out Valerie Wilson (nee Plame). I debunked that nonsense here. But pesky May still sent me email asking me to explain what I had already explained. By not accepting my explanation--and by claiming that what I've written previously is misleading--he is essentially calling me a liar. I take such things personally. (This fellow once asked me if I would be willing to be his partner in a right/left cable-TV face-off. I'm glad it never came to pass.) And there he was again yesterday on CNN expanding his web of fabrication. He said:

You can say what you want about Bob Novak. He has insisted since the beginning that he didn't know she was a secret agent. He just knew she worked at the CIA. Nobody told him that. And if he had known she was secret, he wouldn't have published her name. Now who did publish her name first was David Corn of "The Nation," and he was the first one to say she was a secret agent, and he did that in a conversation with, guess who, with Joe Wilson.

How does one combat repeated silliness of this sort? Who knows what Novak would have done had he been told Valerie Wilson was an undercover officer? And maybe he was told. All we know is that Novak claims the CIA informed him it would prefer if he not name her but did not go ballistic about it. This tale may be true; it may not. (In his own account, Novak still turned down the CIA.) Moreover, Novak did publish her name first. It's right there in the column that prompted the CIA to ask the Justice Department to investigate the White House. CNN anchor Carol Costello should have stopped May and told the audience he was either lying or misspeaking. And May states as a fact that Wilson told me his wife was an undercover officer, even though he has no evidence of this and I have said precisely the opposite. What chutzpah! He doesn't even have an anonymous source to rely on. Is this the sort of journalism he learned when working at The New York Times? Or did he perfect his smear skills when he subsequently served as a spokesperson for the Republican Party? In his absurd article, he at least had the courtesy to present his bogus charge as the product of his own deductive reasoning (as defective as it was). On CNN, he stated as a fact that Wilson had spilled the beans to me about his wife--which is not true . . . .

Disinformation, distraction--that's the plan, as trouble-causing details emerge from the investigation that threaten Karl Rove and other senior Bush aides. For GOP operatives, it's all-hands-to-the-deck time. And the strategy is to fire whatever ammunition the have, whether it is real or a dud. They want to turn this into a partisan mud-wrestle, realizing that much of the public turns off to such cat-and-dogs nastiness. They try to make the victims the culprits, calling Joe Wilson the biggest liar of all time and making claims about Valerie Wilson that are unsupported by the known facts (e.g., she was no more than a desk jockey). Change the focus to anything but what Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and other White House aides did and whether the White House and the president has covered up for them.

Read more.

[Jack Rabbit]

1. From an exchange on the ensuing thread on The Nation:

After I posted David Corn's blog entry of intelligence agents' refutation of the latest right wing talking points:

Jack, Why did the woman who wrote the law say there wasn;t anything wrong with what Rove did?

I can understand the letter because they are worried about moral of the current CIA Spooks. They do have a legit concern and who knows, the author of that letter could have been a drinking buddy of Plames.

Please re-read this paragraph closely...especially the last sentence: These comments reveal an astonishing ignorance of the intelligence community and the role of cover. The fact is that there are thousands of U.S. intelligence officers who "work at a desk" in the Washington, D.C. area every day who are undercover. Some have official cover, and some have non-official cover. Both classes of cover must and should be protected.

The question again is that what class was she? non-official? And by the law, if she was under that level, Rove did nothing wrong. That is an emotional statement backed with no fact by law, which is maybe the reason why the author of the law said Rove did nothing wrong.

Posted 07/20/2005 @ 4:53pm

To which I replied:

The woman who wrote the law is not investigating the case. Her opinion is no more important than yours or mine. Even if Mr. Rove (and now perhaps Mr. Libby) are not charged under the IIPA, they may be charged under another statute. That will be up to Mr. Fitzgerald and the grand jury.

Valerie Plame was NOC in July 2003. What these people are saying is that Rove did something wrong, whether he broke the law or not. Regardless of her status, she was not fair game. Rove and Libby should have their heads handed to them for giving reporters enough information to identify her, regardless of whether they are charged with a crime.

You really ought to get over this equivocation of did nothing wrong with violated the law. They don't necessarily equate.

I will remind you again that the CIA referred this case to the Justice Department for investigation. Somebody there thought this was a serious enough matter for that. It was also serious enough for the Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor, who is still investigating two years after Ms. Plame was unmasked. His time is valuable and he wouldn't spend two years investigating this matter if he believed that this isn't serious. That doesn't necessarily mean he'll file charges; on the other hand, I will be very surprised if he does not.

Ms. Plame, no longer NOC, is now back in Langley. Obviously, she is no longer doing a job that requires her to tell her friends and neighbors that she is an energy analyst for Brewster Jennings or have her photograph published and identified as a CIA employee (I think that's called a cover, Dan; maybe you know another word for it).

If she had actually done something seriously wrong, as the current talking points which are being repeated even this thread maintain, then I seriously doubt she would be back at Langley in any capacity, even if whatever it was she did hadn't violated the law. Do you?

Posted by JACK RABBIT 07/20/2005 @ 5:31pm

A reply from the same poster:

Jack, Understood on the "did nothing wrong" and "violated the law". And to the point of the CIA requesting the investigation; maybe they want the story about Wilson come to light...ever think about that? These guys are masters of manipulation, are they not?

And to answer both you and Krash, I am not defending Rove by any means. I think what he did was questionable, and by looking at the things he did in the past, he looks guilty. If he is found guilty, then he should fry.

I think the only person here who understands where I am coming from is Nonsense. There are bigger and better things to go after. If we want to get into selling or leaking national security information, it goes on all the time. Hell, we were giving China all our Navy secrets when Clinton was in office. Should he be held accountable? No, but it happened under his watch.

What you all keep dismissing, which Nonsense got to some of it, was the fact that Wilson knew not to sign the non disclosure that would bind him from talking to anyone about his findings. I think it stinks because this group that Plame was working for could have been a renagade group from the CIA. Rememeber one thing about NOC's (assuming Plame was one), they are used as double agents and could easily be bought off. I am not trying to discredit Plame, but just trying to come to a logical answer of why the Intel Committee found that Wilson was lying after they reviewed all the information when it finally came in. I think it was also a very arrogant statement by Plames CIA friend to say people are ingorant to the intelligence community. I am not ingorant to think that some of the NOC or low level CIA agents are working both sides of the coin and are being paid in high amounts of cash to do "things" that none of us will ever know about. I also want to know why Wilson referred to "fraud docs" in Niger that he should have had no clue about and was never put in the hands of the CIA until 8 months after he made those comments. And why during his statement last week not stick to the guns that you all are and say that Rove is guilty as sin by the law. He only asked for Bush to fire Rove.

Please start reading between the lines and stop drinking the Dem coolaide, because both sides are just as tainted and you have to wonder if both sides are telling the truth.

I don;t think Rove will be charged with anything because he didn't "violate the law", but maybe he "did something wrong" by your standards. But if you are going to use standards, then you all should have thought of that when you defened Clinton when he lied under oath and some of his admin pleaded the 5th. Not one Bush Admin has pleaded the 5th. And my standards hold that if anyone lied about anything, they should be punished. But if they lied under oath, they should automatically be jailed no matter what the topic is. So, if you want to talk "moral standards", please be careful not to contradict yourselves.

Posted 07/20/2005 @ 6:53pm

To which I retorted:

1. And to the point of the CIA requesting the investigation; maybe they want the story about Wilson come to light...ever think about that?

You are engaging in the kind of conjecture on which cheap conspiracy theories are built. The only difference between the RNC talking points and a cheap conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion, is that I doubt that Ken Mehlman and his minions are so foolish as to really believe that steer manure they've been spreading around about Ambassador Wilson and his wife for the last week any more than I am.

2. There are bigger and better things to go after.

You're right; there are bigger fish to fry than Rove. Their names a Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld, and quite a few smaller fry as well. Do you consider Libby a bigger fish than Rove? If so, there's another one. I think they all deliberately lied in order to lead America into an unnecessary and unprovoked war of aggression against a sovereign state. At the very least, they should be impeached and removed from office. Moreover, they should go to prison for the rest of their lives. If the US is unable or unwilling to prosecute them for that, then an international war crimes tribunal should be convened for the purpose. Yes, I'm serious about that.

3. What you all keep dismissing . . . was the fact that Wilson knew not to sign the non disclosure that would bind him from talking to anyone about his findings.

From the Senate Committee Report (p. 41):

(Directorate of Operations) officials told Committee staff that they promised the former ambassador that they would keep his relationship with CIA confidential, but did not ask the former ambassador to do the same and did not ask him to sign a confidentiality or non-disclosure agreement.

I have no idea why Wilson was not asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. This doesn't give me a clue. As for conjecture on the matter that attempts to spin this into some far-fetched plot to embarrass Mr. Bush based on a speech he would not deliver for another ten months, see the first sentence of my comment in note 1.

4. Please start reading between the lines and stop drinking the Dem coolaide.

I don't like cool aid. Perhaps you should swear off the neoconservative variety (again, see the first sentence of my comment in note 1).

5. (I)f you are going to use standards, then you all should have thought of that when you defened Clinton when he lied under oath and some of his admin pleaded the 5th.

I don't care much for red herring, either. Leave Clinton out of this. Even if I agreed with you that he committed impeachable offenses (and I admit that I don't), then that is still no reason not to punish Karl Rove for his sloppy handling of classified information, which is the least of what he did, or his boss for lying this country into an unnecessary war. OJ walked, but that's no reason not to put the next creep who murders his ex-wife on trial for it.

Posted by JACK RABBIT 07/20/2005 @ 8:22pm

[bemildred]

2. Good job.

:applause: