Editorial -

Will ‘W’ Have H.W. Bush’s Integrity
In Dealing With Machiavellian Rove?

William Finucane

If it didn’t press so severely on so many things, this summer’s problems over Karl Rove treacherous use of secret information – to punish members of a family for not giving the White House correctly slanted information – might be written off as a warm weather political distraction.

But in Mr. Rove’s case, the issues carve their claws into way too many areas. Mr. Rove sits at the right-hand of power, and he used his office and his authority to reveal the classified identity of Valerie Plame, who just happened to be a CIA agent who is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The apparent idea was to hurt Wilson through Plame, since Wilson had failed on an official investigative trip to Niger to find evidence that the African nation had been negotiating with Saddam Hussein over uranium. The Bush Administration was vastly disappointed with Mr. Wilson.

National power politics is one of the areas affected by the current drama over Karl Rove’s actions, but this should not be surprising since the GOP’s Mr. Rove has shown a partisan viciousness that even rivals that of Newt Gingrich, who was a chief architect in setting the Republicans on their current course of seeking total political dominance through the creation of a one-party nation.

Another area affected is national security.

So is national press secrecy.

So is the character of Mr. Rove and other key figures of this administration, whose authority is just short of that of the president himself. Some would say Mr. Rove’s power rivals that of the president, but that was said of H.R. Haldeman too, and he ultimately served 18 months in prison because of actions he took on the behalf of his president, Richard Nixon.

Perhaps these are lightweight matters to some. But for people who harbor the slightest hope of having the nation’s laws play any part at all in determining whether there will be written rules at the base of all governmental actions, these are profoundly important issues.

Of course if the people in power seek to have the laws written or altered in order to be used like helpful or hurtful cards in a game whose objective is to achieve, maintain and wield personal power, well, what is crucial then is how well such laws are written for the successful and unscrupulous politician.

Republican President George W. Bush, for example, has been using laws to his personal taste even before he moved into the White House. His "victory" in the first election, where the Supreme Judicial Court summarily cleared the deck in the state of Florida, where George’s brother Jed Bush was governor, is simply a prime example.

The Supreme Court let Mr. Bush walk away from the election process by summarily declaring him the winner by a majority 5-4 vote of the justices, since the Republicans on the highest court were dissatisfied that the Florida Supreme Court seemed to favor Al Gore. The GOP justices on the Supreme Court implied that there were other important considerations, and that was why they stepped in to overrule the Florida justices, but the game was given away by Republican partisans who made public comments castigating the Florida Supreme Court as packed with Democrats.

All of that was, of course, a lot like the machinations of a guilty person who tries to point the finger at others so that no one looks too closely at him.

But it worked well in 2000, so George at this point is quite familiar with misuse of the law structure and the advantages it can provide.

And now we have Karl Rove, who has access to all types of secret papers and confidential documents, and since it appears clear that he was at the very least indiscrete if not calculatedly malicious in his use of information relating to Valerie Plame, he is now under fire from the Democrats, who clearly would like to see him removed as a senior aide to G.W. Bush, or at a minimum have his access to secret documents withdrawn.

The Democrat’s efforts flopped on the Senate floor, then on the House floor. Of course, Republicans hold both houses. So the Democratic effort was just symbolism.

Republicans then tried some symbolism of their own, putting language in a bill that would strip Democratic leader Sen. Harry Reid of his security clearance, thereby denying him access to secret papers because he once mentioned a secret Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) matter on the Senate floor.

Ahhh, tit for tat.

Both efforts failed.

But these two circumstances have nothing to do with one another save to illustrate how the current GOP leadership functions.

Reid is an elected Senator.

Rove ran for nothing to attain his superpower.

Others like Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Richard Pearl and Paul Wolfowitz, plus other similar Bush Administration powerhouses, also built their strength (or weaknesses) on doing a job for Bush.

Yet what Rove strove to do above all was get Bush elected; other administration bigwigs helped too, but it wasn’t their sole challenge. Rove had a big job. It actually began 30 plus years ago and has meant unknowable hours of work. Rove was possessed with this. He gathered huge lists of supporters. And he even thought of the unthinkable – attack one’s opponent on their very assets.

The attack on Democratic Sen. John Kerry because he was a decorated Vietnam riverboat captain – while Mr. Bush was a mostly absent, apparently sometimes without leave, National Guard pilot on the home front – was brilliant. Instead of trying to wash away the muck from Bush’s face, the often absent National Guard pilot whose wartime activities included patrolling the skies over Oklahoma, the Republicans depended on a new legalistic creation, a 527 political group – with no supposed connection to the Bush camp – to keep Kerry busy fighting allegations that he didn’t deserve the medals he won as a combat officers.

Didn’t matter that among Kerry’s medals are three purple hearts, he was fighting a 527 phantom that somehow, mysteriously, was given great press coverage.

In the case at hand, the Rove methodology was much the same.

Rove met with conservative columnist Robert Novak and Rove let it slip that they both understood the same thing; the ex-ambassador was married to a CIA agent, Valerie Plame. In the journalistic world, this is called confirmation; sometimes it’s anonymous confirmation, sometimes it’s background confirmation, but it is always a mechanism to corroborate facts. There is reason to believe that Mr. Rove’s confirmation of facts was done to punish former ambassador Joseph Wilson because he had not provided the Bush Administration with the support it wanted during the ramping up for the Iraq invasion.

The CIA had dispatched former ambassador Wilson in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa. He found no such evidence.

That put a gaping hole in that year’s Bush Administration speeches illustrating why America had to go to war with Iraq. Wilson’s findings supported those who felt the US had no real reason to fight war with Iraq, and that the suggestion Hussein was preparing a nuclear weapon was being touted in the press for political reasons alone.

Maybe there were legitimate reasons for attacking the Hussein regime, but Bush didn’t have the right ones.

So in a move that simply stinks of Rove maneuvering and machinations, someone let it be known that the wife of Joe Wilson was Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent Plame. Well, despite many denials, it now is clear that someone was Rove.

In the same time period, Rove was also talking with Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and told him that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA agent. Of course it’s been said there was a reason for the action; Rove did not want a wrong or incorrect story to come out. Ridiculous.

Rove could not care less whether a wrong story came out. What he wanted was a story to help him spin the Wilson report his way; that is what a news story is to Rove, a way to make his party look good or to manipulate a situation, and the facts, so that opponents of the administration look bad.

Yet what he did here was monstrous. And he broke federal law by unveiling a CIA agent’s identity. He blew the top off the CIA, awkwardly positioned Time magazine and the New York Times, where reporter Judith Miller has been jailed for refusing to divulge where she got the same information even though she never wrote a story. But right-wing columnist Novak has mysteriously (or perhaps not so mysteriously) walked away unscathed, despite the fact he was prominent in writing the story.

Rove, for all of his Machiavellian machinations, is no blithering idiot. This man is deputy chief of staff of the White House. He knows precisely what he is saying and what it will mean when someone like Novak or Cooper gets a confirmation from him that Wilson is married to Plame; this was political quicksilver.

Letting this out would help the president’s side. Someone who was badmouthing the Iraq war was married to a CIA operative, and this knowledge offered to the public could turn Wilson’s report sour, as though somehow he had other motives and perhaps the Bush Administration allegations were correct.

After all, Plame was in that line of CIA work. Could she be trusted? Or was she involved behind the scenes in getting him assigned to the fact-finding mission in the first place? If so, did she maneuver him into a box for purposes related to the CIA? Pretty far fetched, but given the CIA’s publicly known history it would be good enough to spread doubt, similar to the 527 group’s attacks on John Kerry.

Lots of great scandal makings here.

Rove did not mistakenly let Plame and Wilson’s marriage slip in a conversation with Novak. He knew from experience with Novak exactly how it would pan out; back in 1992 Rove got fired from the George H.W. Bush’s campaign for allegedly leaking a story about Robert ("Rob") Mosbacker, who was a campaign operative for the senior Bush.

It seems that Mr. Rove hasn’t learned any lessons, yet perhaps this time he knows that the Bush he’s working for won’t fire him.

But what matters now is that Rove knows where to place explosives in times of deep political peril. The run up to the Iraq War was such a time and Rove knew exactly what and who would blow up. None of the bodies would necessarily be White House people. But the people in the CIA are in an emergency because of the information that Rove confirmed.

Now the GOP says that Rove merely confirmed that Wilson’s wife – no name mentioned – was a CIA agent. Now that couldn’t possibly be the same a identifying her, could it?

Of course it could.

And Rove knew it could.

He callously placed all the other CIA agents and agency cooperatives who were associated with Plame in danger. This is not like identifying someone as a White House cook or a sloppy file cabinet keeper in the Department of Transportation. No, this is a quantum leap; it is pointing a finger at one of the United States agents and telling the world she is a spy.

As Democratic West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: "When you expose the name of a covert agent, people die."

Americans will never learn who may have died.

But make no mistake, however, even if no one died, there were people running for their lives because Rove contributed to the revelation of their identities. Some of those people may still be looking over their shoulders, and that doesn’t even begin to explore how many undercover operations may have had to be abandoned.

This is exactly the opposite from how a government employee should act. Rove

should have tried to prevent Plame’s real job from being exposed; instead he reinforced the information to a friendly, useful, right-wing columnist, Mr. Novak. If only for that reason he should be kicked out of the administration.

But there is more.

Putting New York Times reporter Judith Miller behind bars is lamentable, but every worthwhile reporter needs to know that they might land in jail for refusing to reveal sources. That is part of the business. If reporters revealed their sources, the press would be worthless. Many states therefore have reporter shield laws to protect sources.

But the nation does not have such rules. So reporters have to let their loved ones know they might go behind bars rather than reveal sources. What is more worrisome is that more and more press ownership is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. As that happens, the most important thing in the press board rooms usually becomes making a buck rather than fighting the government over things like source protection.

A Judith Miller might be perfectly willing to spend time in jail. As long as the corporate board stands behind her, she’s fine. But will her corporation always be there? Ms. Miller at least works for the New York Times, where journalism still trumps financial considerations. Yet the fact that Robert Novak printed a column and walks away and Miller, who didn’t print a story, goes to jail seems to indicate another agenda; it is not hard to conclude that the current presidential administration and its Congressional and judicial allies see this as an opportunity to push the envelope against journalism in general, and the hated New York Times in particular.

It is hard to imagine that this lesson isn’t being taken to heart in the boardrooms of the big newspaper chains that already have a conservative slant, and there is little doubt that large television and radio outlets will run away from the possibility of entanglements like this; after all, TV and radio are already government licensed.

This danger gets geometrically greater when a media conglomerate that is controlled by a few rich stockholders sees that it may have to risk its whole financial future on fighting in court for what seems like a very fine point – who told what to whom. Yet that little truth can save a democracy.

This dangerous press situation is not Rove’s doing. He is simply a potential beneficiary, and certainly is smart enough to understand how to move the issue.

The problem is that Rove’s ‘good luck’ is bad luck for the citizens who must hope to know what is truly really going on if they are going to be able to preserve the historic democracy that they inherited.

It seems eminently clear that from Rove, that is one thing never, ever to expect – truth. In fact, in the past few years it has become abundantly clear that the Bush Administration itself cannot operate like that; it simply cannot start talking truth.

In terms of Rove, he now needs to detach his personal, lifelong vocation to right-wing agendas from the Bush Administration. In office, sitting next to the president, he has shown by his lifelong activities, which have culminated in the Plame scandal, that he is a profound danger to the United States democracy. It is unlikely, however, that Mr. Rove will find any vestige of appreciation for the Constitution within himself, and therefore it will be a true test of the Bush Administration.

If Mr. Rove is not dismissed over this scandal, it will tell everyone that the junior Bush is very different than his father, and it will indicate that the current Bush Administration is fully committed to the radical politics that Karl Rove clearly embodies.