Tag: Worst President Ever

From yesterday’s Chicago Tribune comes A Layman’s Guide to the Valerie Plame Affair by Garrison Keillor, an author and the host of the radio program, “A Prairie Home Companion”:

I feel it’s time for me to step forward and tell what I know about Karl Rove’s conversation with columnist Robert Novak in which Mr. Novak reportedly told Mr. Rove that CIA operative Valerie Plame had been responsible for her husband, Joseph Wilson, going to Niger to debunk the White House’s claim that Saddam Hussein was shopping for uranium in Africa to make nuclear weapons and that’s why we invaded Iraq, and Mr. Rove said, “Yes, I’ve heard that too.” Mr. Rove has been accused of revealing the identity of a covert intelligence officer. This simply isn’t true.

I happened to be in Mr. Rove’s office when the phone rang. I was there on behalf of my publisher, to see if Mr. Rove knows enough to make him worth a $6 million advance on his memoirs. (Answer: Not really.) He picked up the phone and the voice at the other end sounded like a rat trapped in a coffee can. “Novak,” whispered Mr. Rove and he pretended to stick a finger down his throat. He listened for several minutes. “Yes, I’ve heard that too,” he said.

As he spoke to Novak, Mr. Rove wrote on a notepad, “Rosebud knows”–“Rosebud” being Vice President Dick Cheney’s code name–and winked at me.

This raised a question in my mind: Did Rove know Ms. Plame had taken the identity of Mr. Cheney during an arrhythmia episode at Walter Reed and that a heavily sedated vice president had been flown by the CIA to Riyadh as Ms. Plame donned a latex-padded suit and took his place? She quickly discovered that the uranium was stored at the Whitewater property once owned by the Clintons and then deeded to Kofi Annan and used as a supply depot for black helicopters. She tried to warn Mr. Clinton and the next day he had that mysterious “bypass” operation after which he suddenly got chummy with ex-CIA chief George H.W. Bush and the two flew off to Southeast Asia like in an old Crosby-Hope “Road” picture.

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According to the Washington Post Robert Novak, the rightwing propagandist, was warned by a CIA spokesman in 2003 not to publish White House spin that Bush critic Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by his wife, CIA secret agent Valerie Plame:

[Bill] Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson’s wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.

Harlow said that after Novak’s call, he checked Plame’s status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame’s name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified.

In a column published Oct. 1, 2003, Novak wrote that the CIA official he spoke to “asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause ‘difficulties’ if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson’s wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name.”

So Novak’s excuse is, “I did it because I’m idiot who can’t read between the lines when a CIA spokesman is telling me an operative is covert.”

Thanks to FactCheck.org for this cool timeline of events leading up to the current mess.

The Timeline

1988-1991 – Joseph Wilson serves as Deputy Chief of Mission in Baghdad, Iraq. In July 1990, he takes over as acting ambassador to Iraq. (Joseph Wilson, The Politics of Truth 451, 2004).

1992-1995 – Nominated by President George H.W. Bush, Wilson serves as Ambassador to the African nations of Gabon, as well as the smaller island country of the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe. (Wilson, Politics 451).

1995-1997 – Joseph Wilson serves as political adviser to the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces in Europe, stationed in Germany. On a trip to Washington DC, Wilson meets Valerie Plame who at the time says she is an “energy executive living in Brussels.” (Wilson, Politics 239-242).

June 1997 – Joseph Wilson returns to Washington DC as Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council. At about the same time, Plame also moves back to the United States (Wilson, Politics 240), in part because the CIA suspects her name was leaked to the Russians in 1994. (Vanity Fair, Jan. ‘04).

April 3, 1998 – Wilson and Plame marry. (Wilson, Politics 276).

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