From the beginning of the scandal around the outing of the CIA secret agent Valerie Plame by top White House officials, Bush’s spinners and GOP operatives have worked as hard as they could to create confusion about Wilson’s status as a covert agent. The desperation with which they have tried to muddy the waters about Wilson’s undercover status is a clue to how dangerous they consider this piece of information to be.
Now we see for certain what many of us have long suspected: For Republicans, the rule of law only applies to Democrats.
For starters, if the public believed Wilson was covert, the fact that her cover was blown by top White House officials, including Karl Rove and Scooter Libby — who was working under instructions from his boss, Vice Pres. Cheney — would be construed as unseemly, at the very least.
Of course, White House officials are restricted from revealing government secrets by their security clearances. But what had many top West Wingers concerned was the fact that there’s also a specific law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), that forbids government officials from revealing the identity of covert personnel. In fact, former White House spokesperson Ari Fletcher was so concerned that he may have run afoul of the IIPA that he sought, and was granted, immunity from prosecution before he testified.
When Valerie Wilson testified before a House committee in March, she said, under oath, that she was covert. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) also read a statement from Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, that stated that Wilson was covert at the time she was outed. And yet, the White House and GOP operatives have continued to lie about Wilson’s status.
While it is doubtful that anything can stop them, there is finally official confirmation now from the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald — writing in a recommendation for Scooter Libby’s sentencing for perjury related to the case — that Valerie Wilson was indeed covert:
The unclassified summary of Plame’s employment with the CIA at the time that syndicated columnist Robert Novak published her name on July 14, 2003 says, “Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for who the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.”
Former CIA agent Larry Johnson, who was a colleague of Wilson’s, says this confirmation of Wilson’s status bolsters the charge that Rove, Libby and others violated the IIPA when they revealed her identity to reporters:
Fitz makes the following points:
– Valerie Wilson was an operations officer working in the Counter Proliferation Division (CPD) of the Directorate of Operations and headed a unit that covered weapons proliferation issues concerning Iraq.
– While in CPD Valerie traveled overseas seven times to more than ten countries always, repeat always, undercover.
– Valerie was a covert officer on 14 July 2003, when Novak identified her as a CIA employee.
– The CIA was taking "affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States."
Despite this development, there remains little or no chance that these White House officials will be held accountable for revealing Wilson’s identity — which is egregiously compounded by the fact that Wilson was a specialist in tracking black-market sales of weapons of mass destruction. We will probably never know what sources and counter-proliferation activities were compromised by the treasonous actions of Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove.
At the very least, we are left to wonder why Karl Rove still has a security clearance for working at the White House.
It was just a decade ago that Republicans hounded the Clinton White House over every perceived and/or fabricated infraction.Their strategy was to hobble and render ineffective an American president proved unsuccessful, so they switched their focus to Pres. Clinton’s sex life, which led them to impeach him over a sex lie.
All the while they were leading the nation down the dangerous path toward overthrowing its duly and twice-elected government, they claimed they were only concerned with “the rule of law.” Now we see for certain what many of us have long suspected: For Republicans, the rule of law only applies to Democrats.