Understanding Plamegate
Lewis Libby told Judy Miller about Valerie Plame. No, Cheney told Libby to tell Miller. No, Bush told Cheney to tell Libby to tell Miller. No, Bush just told Cheney to tell somebody; he didn’t say who. And who cares, because Plame is a loser anyway! Recent coverage of the Plame affair sounds like a particularly nasty junior high school rumor mill. After some research, I’ve formulated my take on the scandal, and broken it down below in the form of a Q-and-A.
Q: Do recent news stories allege that Bush authorized the leaking of Plame’s name?
No. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has filed a brief stating that Bush authorized I. Lewis Libby to discuss with reporters “a portion of a classified prewar document in which U.S. intelligence agencies declared Iraq was vigorously trying to procure uranium.”
This information may have been meant to rebut the claims of Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame’s husband, who accused the Bush administration of “exaggerating the Iraqi threat.”
Q: So why should we care about this leak?
If Bush sanctioned the leaking of the document, that would show that he and/or Cheney authorized giving classified information to selected journalists.
Former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro told the Philadelphia Inquirer that there is “no doubt in my mind that there was a governmentwide program of distributing on a selective basis intelligence information that supported the administration’s policy point of view. It was the use of classified intelligence for political purposes.”
Q: Okay, but what does this have to do with Valerie Plame?
Some people think that Bush or Cheney wanted to “out” her in order to punish Joseph Wilson. Other people say it doesn’t matter, because Valerie Plame wasn’t doing a good job of keeping her own identity secret. Maybe she wasn’t, but that doesn’t really explain why high-up government officials were having lots of conversations about her on deep background with influential Washington journalists.
The real story here is those deep-background conversations. The government has chosen to deal with classified information by leaking it out in dribs and drabs to friendly reporters.
If the President (or the VP) is going to declassify information, he should do it openly, not by passing it to handpicked journalists. If everybody gets the same info, we can all draw our own conclusions. If only those with special access get the info, then they can spin it before it ever gets to us. This is tantamount to domestic psyops.
Perhaps propaganda is sometimes necessary in wartime. However, since we are currently engaged in a war with no defined end, it behooves us to be very careful about granting our President extraordinary indulgence. I, for one, am not ready to give up my right to accurate news reporting. When the commander-in-chief of the military becomes commander-in-chief of the media, the truth loses.
Note: I have been neglecting this blog recently in favor of my Newsvine column. My apologies. Note that the feed on right allows you to keep up with my Newsvine posts if you so choose. Rest assured that all humor and spamalog posts will appear here first.
April 13th, 2006 at 11:29 pm | Promoted
I’ve been finding this story more and more amusing as it goes on, simply because of the parallels with recent history. In the 90s, the Monica Lewinsky scandal blew up not because the president had sex with an intern, but because he tried to cover it up. And the legal problems for Clinton were not a result of any sexual acts with Ms. Lewinsky (it’s debatable whether that would have violated any laws, and if it did Lewinsky might have been the only person who could legally have brought charges against him), but because the coverup involved possible perjury and/or obstruction of justice.
Fast-forward to the present, and we have a scandal which really blew up not because of the initial act — the leaking of Plame’s identity — but because of… the cover-up. The legal problems don’t really begin with the leak, because it’s debatable whether that was illegal (the usual argument is that Bush, as chief executive of the federal government and commander-in-chief of the military, is the ultimate authority on what is and is not classified, and that if he orders a piece of information to be disclosed then it is, by definition, not classified), but rather with the coverup, which may have involved perjury and/or obstruction of justice.
It’s rather frightening sometimes to see how people don’t pay attention to even the bits of history they’ve lived through.