Washington feels the heat for blowing agent’s cover

Analysis by Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Oct. 4 (IPS)— One has to feel sorry for Republicans. Although they control both houses of the US Congress and the White House, they must think they’re living through a bad dream. Consider Republicans on Capitol Hill in particular:

After campaigning for a constitutional amendment that would require the federal government to balance its budget, they’re forced to defend the biggest deficits in US history, all requested by their president.

After electing a president who promised never to engage in “nation-building” overseas, he’s demanding that they finance the biggest nation-building exercise since Vietnam.

They ran on a platform that promised that US troops would never be used for peacekeeping. Now they’re being asked to defend an occupation where 130,000 troops are engaged mainly in directing traffic, giving away soccer balls, and mediating tribal disputes in dusty Iraqi villages, while being shot at by unknown assailants who almost always get away.

They elected a president who promised to pursue a “humble” foreign policy, and now they’re expected to pay for a global empire whose manpower requirements are wreaking havoc on their beloved army and the reserves.

If all that makes them feel as if they’ve passed over into some parallel universe, now, after years of beating up on Democrats for criticizing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), they’re being told by their leader to pretend that the public “outing” of a covert officer by two “senior White House officials” is no big deal.

And not just any covert officer at that.

A woman, devoted wife and mother of two small children, whose job, until her cover was blown by those “senior White House officials,” was to track down rogues and terrorists bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. A secret heroine in the twilight world of President George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”

Clearly the Republican reflex is to pour forth their outrage against the dastardly traitors who exposed her identity and call for their execution, rather than the measly 10 years prescribed for such crimes by a 1982 law enacted to protect covert operatives from exposure.

But they have a serious problem.

Those “most insidious of traitors,” as former President George H.W. Bush once called such people, apparently are also tight with the current president, at least if you can believe five yet-to-be-identified Washington reporters who confirmed to The Washington Post this week that they, like Robert Novak, the right-wing columnist who first named Plame in print in July, were told by two senior White House officials about Plame’s secret identity. The traitors appear, in other words, to be Republicans, and not just any Republicans.

Most of the speculation is focused on Karl Rove, Bush’s top political adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s powerful chief of staff and national security adviser.

The stakes are very high, as indicated by the fact that Republicans on Capitol Hill have been told not only to stifle their righteous indignation, but also to enlist in a campaign, as one anonymous Republican Congressional aide told the New York Times this week, to “slime and defend” against Plame and her husband, retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Wilson, a career diplomat who was sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq had bought huge quantities of uranium yellowcake, published an article in the New York Times in early July in which he charged that the White House must have known that those reports were unfounded and fraudulent when Bush cited them in his State of the Union Address last January as evidence that Hussein was building a nuclear weapon. It is widely known that Cheney and Libby, both superhawks on Iraq, displayed a special interest in those reports.

Within a week of the publication of that article, the calls to Novak and the other reporters about Plame’s identity and relationship with Wilson were made.

Last week, word that the CIA had formally asked the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation was leaked to the press.

Already on the defensive over the mounting death toll and skyrocketing financial costs in Iraq, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, and plummeting poll ratings, the White House and its allies in the media have spent much of the past few days trying to smear her and her husband.

Thus, according to anonymous sources, Plame is really a mere “analyst,” not a covert officer at all.

Plame told lots of people she worked for the CIA, according to another story that is being plied to reporters. Both accounts appear to be untrue.

Louder guns are firing on Wilson, who had publicly opposed the war before it was fought and has contributed money to Sen. John Kerry’s campaign. He didn’t even a file a written report on his findings in Niger, goes one story. “He’s not even a professionally trained intelligence operative, so why take his account seriously?” goes another line of attack.

But even attacking Wilson is a tough target for Republicans whose performance under fire when he was the highest-ranking US diplomat in Baghdad before and during the first Gulf War is virtually legendary. Known for his irreverence and panache, he became a hero to hundreds of expatriates — many of them oilmen who are Republicans by instinct — whom Hussein had threatened to hold as hostages. The elder Bush praised him at the time a “truly inspiring diplomat” and extolled his “courageous leadership.”

Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson are definitely not the best targets for attack, especially for Republicans.

So, while the vast majority of those Republican lawmakers have gone along, however grimly, with all the other demands the Bush administration has made on them — even those that made it appear that they were betraying their own conservative ideals — this one may be too much to swallow. Indeed, one key committee chairman met privately with Wilson Thursday.

Meanwhile, Democrats — whose recent transformation into fiscal conservatives, skeptics of nation-building, and defenders of the armed forces and the CIA has been just as disorienting as the Republican metamorphosis under Bush — are demanding that an independent prosecutor be appointed to get to the bottom of the case and punish those responsible for Plame’s betrayal to the maximum extent of the law.

And cheering them on, albeit more discreetly, are thousands of professional US diplomats, intelligence officers, and Army officers — past and present — who see in the White House’s treatment of Plame and Wilson metaphors for the ideological zeal and ruthlessness of the Bush administration. Those national-security professionals, who tend to vote Republican, are angry. For them, in Valerie Plame, they have found their Joan of Arc, and she’s definitely not for burning.

Ashcroft to probe Rove; Bush approves

Compiled By Bob Strott

Oct. 8(AGR)—President George Bush’s closest political adviser, Karl Rove, is at the center of a criminal investigation into allegations that he leaked the name of a CIA agent in an attempt to suppress criticism of the administration’s Iraq policy, in what is fast becoming the administration’s worst scandal since coming to office.

The man at the center of this firestorm is Joseph Wilson, the retired U.S. diplomat who debunked the White House’s key evidence that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear program.

Wilson, a former US ambassador, has been in the sights of the White House ever since this summer, when he revealed that, after traveling to Niger at the request of the CIA, he had concluded that Iraq had not been seeking to buy uranium. His comments forced the White House to admit that “16 words” included in the President’s State of the Union speech making such a link had been wrong.

A few days later, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote a column in which he cited “two senior administration officials” and stated that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative dealing with weapons of mass destruction [WMD].

Wilson said that the outing of his wife as an alleged CIA operative and other attempts to discredit him “are clearly intended to intimidate others from coming forward.” But it’s not just intimidation; it’s a felony. According to Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst who worked under Bush Sr. at both the CIA and the White House, “The Intelligence Identities Protection Act was made draconian, it was made very, very specific, automatic penalties that would accrue to both officials and non-officials-anyone who knowingly disclosed the identity of a CIA agent or officer.” The penalty: fines of up to $50,000 and imprisonment of up to 10 years.

And what makes this story even more remarkable is how seriously the Bush family has viewed the outing of intelligence operatives in the past. It was the President’s father, a former spy chief, who called it treason to leak the name of an undercover officer. And in this case, the officer was one who was working on the most vital security issue of all, the proliferation of WMD. At a time when good intelligence and successful spying has never been more essential to the nation’s defense, the deliberate unmasking of a spy sent shudders through the secret web of spooks worldwide.

When a U.S. operative is unmasked, foreign spy agencies go back, retrace his steps, review his contacts and try to figure out how the CIA operated in their country. “Anyone who was seen with her overseas is tainted now,” warns a former officer who knew Plame.

Reporters at Time magazine and NBC News and a handful of others were also tipped off about Plame, and Democrats claim the source in each case was Rove. According to some accounts, Rove did not mention Plame by name but referred to “Wilson’s wife” being a CIA employee.

At a public meeting in August, Wilson, a staunch Democrat himself, said: “It’s of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frogmarched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words.”

Rove, who has been based in Utah and associated with the Mormon Church, is widely viewed as the chief engineer of the current Bush administration. He and Tom DeLay are attempting to force the Texas legislature to redistrict its Congressional delegations, adding seven sure seats to the Republican column.

Rove is also a prime behind-the-scenes mover in the Schwarzenegger campaign. Strategists note that by controlling the state houses in California, New York, Florida, and Texas the GOP will have a lock on the four largest states in the union, and thus the ability to manipulate vote counts and strip voter registration rolls in the run-up to the 2004 election.

The White House has turned down Democratic demands for the appointment of a Kenneth Star-style independent counsel to look into the matter. The inquiry will instead be carried out by the Department of Justice under the supervision of the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist.

Democrats have raised a public alarm: How can Justice credibly investigate so secretive an administration, especially when the investigators are led by Attorney General John Ashcroft. A TIME review of federal and state election records reveals that Ashcroft paid Rove’s Texas firm $746,000 for direct-mail services in two gubernatorial campaigns and one Senate race from 1984 through 1994.

If Mr Rove is charged, it will seriously damage the president’s standing at the start of his re-election campaign and rob him of an electoral mastermind who orchestrated his rise to the Texas governorship and then the presidency.

Sources: Columbus Free Press, Democracy Now!, The Guardian UK, Pan African News Wire

Peltier seeks parole hearing

Denver, Colorado, Sept. 29— Some 250 supporters of Leonard Peltier gathered outside the federal courthouse in Denver during recent court proceedings. High level government officials, a vast number of attorneys and thousands of supporters from across the country and in foreign countries have called Peltier a political prisoner.

Leonard Peltier has served more than twice as long in prison than federal guidelines require.

The parole commission denied parole once and determined based on faulty evidence that Peltier would not be considered for parole until 2008. That prompted Peltier to put the case up to the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Peltier is hopeful that the Appellate Court will direct the Parole Commission to provide information that would substantiate the reason for not conducting the parole hearing.

“When the commission puts off a hearing for more than 48 months it has to be supportable,” said Barry Bachrach, Peltier attorney.

The argument before the Appeals panel was that the federal government has shown that it cannot provide evidence that proves Peltier was in the immediate vicinity when two FBI agents were killed at point-blank range on June 26, 1975, near Oglala on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

In 1996, the commission went against the federal parole guidelines when it concluded that Peltier fired the fatal shots that took the lives of Special Agents Jack R. Coler and Ronald A. Williams. That fact was never proven in court.

“The decision must be reversed if the facts are incorrect and unsupported by the record,” Bachrach told the court.

Peltier played a role in the upheaval that occurred on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1973 to 1975 and somewhat beyond that was identified by many as a war zone. It came to a head in 1975 with the FBI agents’ deaths and with the 1976 discovery of the body of Ana Mae Pictou-Aquash, a member of the American Indian Movement and a participant in the activities on the reservation.

The government’s argument, given by Erick Melgren of Wichita, Kan. said the commission was very clear in its decision that Peltier should not be paroled whether or not he actually pulled the trigger. He was also pessimistic that the commission would change its mind should another hearing be ordered.

Bachrach asserts that the commission neglected to consider the testimony of former US Attorney Lynn Crooks, who told a US Circuit Court earlier that the government could not absolutely prove that Peltier was the shooter. A lynchpin that supports that argument is the fact that a rifle said to be Peltier’s did not match the ballistics test of the bullets removed from the agents. That evidence was never presented in court and didn’t come to light until a few years after Peltier was in prison.

And if Peltier is in jail for aiding and abetting he should have been paroled more than 11 years ago, Bachrach said.

The parole commission’s position is that Peltier deserved to spend so much time in prison because he helped ambush the agents, which suggests that he is in prison for aiding and abetting. But the commission also added its opinion, not substantiated by fact, that he pulled the trigger.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1995 was not persuaded by arguments that missing evidence, inaccurate facts and false testimony should allow Peltier a new trial.

According to federal guidelines at the time Peltier was convicted and sentenced, he should have been paroled in 1986. President Bill Clinton was lobbied heavily by members of the FBI that also purchased full-page newspaper advertisements to not issue a clemency order for Peltier before he left office.

That was a political issue at the time, Bachrach said, and for the FBI to get involved with a judicial issue, which is the case now, would be fraudulent.

Bachrach said he was pleased with the court appearance and that the three judges on the 10th Circuit were responsive to arguments in support of Peltier, but there is not speculation when a decision will be issued.

Source: Indian Country (By David Melmer and Associated Press reports)