Hitch on Plame etc
[Man it must be lonely to be CH these days…]
Plame Out The ridiculous end to the scandal that distracted Washington.
By Christopher Hitchens
I had a feeling that I might slightly regret the title (”Case
Closed”) of my July 25 column on the Niger uranium story. I have now
presented thousands of words of evidence and argument to the effect
that, yes, the Saddam Hussein regime did send an important Iraqi
nuclear diplomat to Niger in early 1999. And I have not so far
received any rebuttal from any source on this crucial point of
contention. But there was always another layer to the Joseph Wilson
fantasy. Easy enough as it was to prove that he had completely missed
the West African evidence that was staring him in the face, there
remained the charge that his nonreport on a real threat had led to a
government-sponsored vendetta against him and his wife, Valerie Plame.
In his July 12 column in the Washington Post, Robert Novak had
already partly exposed this paranoid myth by stating plainly that
nobody had leaked anything, or outed anyone, to him. On the contrary,
it was he who approached sources within the administration and the
CIA and not the other way around. But now we have the final word on
who did disclose the name and occupation of Valerie Plame, and it
turns out to be someone whose opposition to the Bush policy in Iraq
has—like Robert Novak’s—long been a byword in Washington. It is
particularly satisfying that this admission comes from two of the
journalists—Michael Isikoff and David Corn—who did the most to get
the story wrong in the first place and the most to keep it going long
beyond the span of its natural life.
As most of us have long suspected, the man who told Novak about
Valerie Plame was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s deputy at the
State Department and, with his boss, an assiduous underminer of the
president’s war policy. (His and Powell’s—and George Tenet’s—
fingerprints are all over Bob Woodward’s “insider” accounts of
post-9/11 policy planning, which helps clear up another nonmystery:
Woodward’s revelation several months ago that he had known all along
about the Wilson-Plame connection and considered it to be no big
deal.) The Isikoff-Corn book, which is amusingly titled Hubris,
solves this impossible problem of its authors’ original “theory” by
restating it in a passive voice:
The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with
colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case,
underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the
initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how
far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from
a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.
In the stylistic world where disclosures are gleaned and ironies
underscored, the nullity of the prose obscures the fact that any
irony here is only at the authors’ expense. It was Corn in particular
who asserted—in a July 16, 2003, blog post credited with starting the
entire distraction—that:
The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and
misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is
evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation’s
counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is
a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.
After you have noted that the Niger uranium connection was in fact
based on intelligence that has turned out to be sound, you may also
note that this heated moral tone (”thuggish,” “gang”) is now quite
absent from the story. It turns out that the person who put Valerie
Plame’s identity into circulation was a staunch foe of regime change
in Iraq. Oh, that’s all right, then. But you have to laugh at the way
Corn now so neutrally describes his own initial delusion as one that
was “seized on by administration critics.”
What does emerge from Hubris is further confirmation of what we knew
all along: the extraordinary venom of the interdepartmental rivalry
that has characterized this administration. In particular, the
bureaucracy at the State Department and the CIA appear to have used
the indiscretion of Armitage to revenge themselves on the
“neoconservatives” who had been advocating the removal of Saddam
Hussein. Armitage identified himself to Colin Powell as Novak’s
source before the Fitzgerald inquiry had even been set on foot. The
whole thing could—and should—have ended right there. But now read
this and rub your eyes: William Howard Taft, the State Department’s
lawyer who had been told about Armitage (and who had passed on the
name to the Justice Department) also felt obligated to inform White
House counsel Alberto Gonzales. But Powell and his aides feared the
White House would then leak that Armitage had been Novak’s source—
possibly to embarrass State Department officials who had been
unenthusiastic about Bush’s Iraq policy. So Taft told Gonzales the
bare minimum: that the State Department had passed some information
about the case to Justice. He didn’t mention Armitage. Taft asked if
Gonzales wanted to know the details. The president’s lawyer, playing
the case by the book, said no, and Taft told him nothing more.
“[P]laying the case by the book” is, to phrase it mildly, not the way
in which Isikoff and Corn customarily describe the conduct of the
White House. In this instance, however, the evidence allows them no
other choice. But there is more than one way in which a case can be
played by the book. Under the terms of the appalling and
unconstitutional Intelligence Identities Protection Act (see “A Nutty
Little Law,” my Slate column of July 26, 2005), the CIA can, in
theory, “refer” any mention of itself to the Justice Department to
see if the statute—denounced by The Nation and the New York Times
when it was passed—has been broken. The bar here is quite high.
Perhaps for that reason, Justice sat on the referral for two months
after Novak’s original column. But then, rather late in the day, at
the end of September 2003, then-CIA Director George Tenet himself
sent a letter demanding to know whether the law had been broken.
The answer to that question, as Patrick Fitzgerald has since
determined, is “no.” But there were plenty of senior people who had
known that all along. And can one imagine anybody with a stronger
motive to change the subject from CIA incompetence and to present a
widely discredited agency as, instead, a victim, than Tenet himself?
The man who kept the knowledge of the Minnesota flight schools to
himself and who was facing every kind of investigation and obloquy
finally saw a chance to change the subject. If there is any “irony”
in the absurd and expensive and pointless brouhaha that followed, it
is that he was abetted in this by so many who consider themselves
“radical.”