Leaks v. Releases

I’m not as upset about the allegations that President Bush authorized the release of information that supported his run up to the Iraq War and countered to some degree the argument of Ambassador Joseph Wilson regarding the phony story that Saddam was seeking uranium from Niger. Since I thought the whole run up to the war was phony as hell, why would I be upset about a tempest such as this?

Naturally, almost everybody, including me, expected that a half a dozen canisters of poison gas and two labs with some germs would be found and this would be enough to exonerate Bush on his WMD whopper. Unfortunately for him, the best laid plans of mice and men oft go… It still would have been a rotten war, but at least the proponents would have covered their butts.

With the preventive attack on Iraq I was convinced that we were dealing with a messianic president hell bent on going to war no matter what. To think that administrations and their opponents won’t use every tool, fair or foul, at their disposal to win their points is naive. The only thing the bugs me is the deception of Bush and his crowd that proclaims their goodness, righteousness, and, above all, values at every turn. The only difference between this crowd and every administration that’s gone before is that they’re bigger hypocrites than all of their predecessors put together.

Once you’ve decided to go to war, cherry picking intelligence to support the effort is what governments do, even ours. Really, there are some who think that some of the charges against King George III were stretched a tad; that our sojourn into Mexico in the nineteenth century wasn’t exactly as we’d been led to believe; that McKinley and his Vice President – what was his name? - weren’t beyond hyperbole concerning Spain; that LBJ and his Tonkin incident weren’t totally as stated; and so it went throughout our two hundred years.

In the case of a war you’ve decided is immoral or illegal and that doesn’t have wide or deep support, fruit picking from the other side can be anticipated as well. The Pentagon Papers of the Vietnam come quickly to mind. In this case, Joe Wilson was confident of his opinion on the uranium question and the war as he – and I - saw it was based on at least one false premise, and he wrote his op-ed piece with complete understanding that he was stepping into the line of fire.

That presidential governance in this democracy means you have the power to take executive action without the support of everybody should not surprise us. To martial public opinion almost by definition means that you have to pick and choose which bits of information to emphasize and which to minimize. Wilson and Bush did their things. Naturally, it’s the Scooters of the world who have to fall on their swords. But guys like Cap Weinberger who were a little too aggressive in the past in such capers were taken off the hook by presidents who understood the game. So Scooter will probably not spend too many nights in the gray bar motel.

A separate issue is the outing of Wilson’s wife. So far, no one is alleging that President Bush or Dick Cheney authorized that Ms. Plame be identified as being a covert CIA operative. Naturally, if that were the case, this little embarrassment for the administration would become far more serious and could lead to impeachment. Also, if Mr. Libby is convicted of intentionally releasing Ms. Plame’s name, he will indeed be in serious jeopardy, and he should be.

Many do not realize the seriousness of the outing of Ms. Plame. To us, she was simply a mid to high level bureaucrat working at CIA headquarters when the information was first released in a column by Robert Novak. It is unlikely that such an expose threatens the life of Valerie Plame rather it puts in jeopardy the lives of foreign contacts from whom in the past she extracted information or assistance and, without getting to far off the track, any American agents and other operatives that could somehow be connected with her in her postings.

The Plame affair is a life and death matter and should be pursued to the end by the prosecutor and the Agency.

So until this gets to be more than embarrassment for the president, I’m happy to watch poor Scott McClellan dance and explain again and again the difference between `leaks’ and `releases’.

Blog on!

Wild Bill