Blog Reveals Bush Advisor Rove Exposed CIA Agent's Identity :: from www.uruknet.info :: news from occupied Iraq - ch
Blog Reveals Bush Advisor Rove Exposed CIA Agent's Identity
July 2, 2005
In a post at The Huffington Post weblog, senior MSNBC political analyst and Former Chief of Staff Lawrence O'Donnell asserts that Karl Rove, George W. Bush's chief political advisor, is the confidential source that revealed the identify of Valerie Plame as a CIA "operative".
"Karl Rove was Matt Cooper's source," states O'Donnell. "I have known this for months but didn't want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury."
If the revelation turn out to be accurate, "RoveGate" may join other recent controversies as tests of the power of blogs, podcasts and other Internet media to force stories into the mainstream news.
Karl Rove: Traitor for Politics?
Many have suggested that Plame was outed by the White House in retaliation for her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, charging that the Bush administration lied to the American people about US intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Wilson had been sent to Niger to investigate documents that implied Iraq had attempted to illegally purchase uranium. Wilson reported to the CIA and the State Department that the information was "unequivocally wrong" and that the documents had been forged. The discredited information was used in the President's State of the Union address to support his Weapons of Mass Destruction case against Iraq.
In early October 2003, Newsweek reported that Rove had called MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews and told him that Wilson's wife was "fair game". White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters at the time that any suggestion that Rove had played a role in outing Plame was "totally ridiculous."
Because of the confidential nature of Plame's role, it's unknown whether any lives were lost as a result of her outing. At a minimum, her exposure eliminated her value as a CIA operative. The exposure of a covert government agent would violate the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years.
Google Search Revealed Yellowcake Forgeries
According to an article on the forged "Yellowcake" documents at WikiPedia, it took International Atomic Energy Agency officials only a matter of hours to determine that the documents Wilson had discredited were fake. Using little more than a Google search, IAEA experts discovered indications of a crude forgery, such as the use of incorrect names of Niger officials. As a result, the IAEA reported to the U.N. Security Council that the documents were "in fact not authentic."
Vincent Cannistaro, the former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA and the intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, has suggested that "The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein..."
Worse than Watergate?
Wilson charged that his wife's CIA association had been deliberately exposed by the White House in order to destroy her career, in retaliation for his public charge that the Bush administration had lied to the American people about U.S. intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In an article in The New York Times on 6 July 2003, Wilson denounced the Bush administration, saying that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
In an article at Salon, John Dean, counsel to President Nixon, has stated "In blowing the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame to take political revenge on her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for telling the truth, Bush's people have out-Nixoned Nixon's people. And my former colleagues were not amateurs by any means."
