Monday, July 11, 2005

Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!   Due to a Matthew Cooper email, we now know Karl Rove revealed that Ambassador Wilson's wife was a fairly senior official in the CIA.  The defense of Karl Rove so far has been purely technical.  Rove's defenders say there is no hard evidence that Rove knew she was a covert agent.  Also, he did not actually name Valerie Plame; he merely named the wife of Ambassador Wilson.  Someone would have to look in, say, a phone book to discover that Ambassador Wilson's wife was Valerie Plame.  Who would guess that reporters could master such sophisticated investigatorial skills?   If Rove never went further than he did in his talks with Cooper, it's even possible that Rove may have evaded lying to the grand jury…as long as he was asked if he named Plame (which, according to the memo, he didn’t do…he merely made it so a six-year-old child could find out her name without any difficulty), and not asked if he revealed her identity...which he certainly did. The very care that the Senior Advisor to the President Karl Rove appears to have used to purely technically not name Plame overwhelmingly suggests that he was perfectly aware that she was a covert agent, and thus that outing her was damaging to national security, and to American interests both at home and abroad.  The secrecy of the identities of our CIA agents has got to be a necessary and integral part of the war on terrorism; revealing such an identity is deliberate and cruelly calculated sabotage to that war.  Whether he can be prosecuted for any of his acts against the United States of America, Karl Rove is guilty as Hell. The White House, and Karl Rove, however, have certainly and frequently lied to the American public on the subject.  They have repeatedly said no one in the White House was involved in any way with revealing her identity, and they specifically said the same thing about Karl Rove.  Just recently, the President said that there should continue to be a vigorous investigation of just who was responsible for this heinous act.  Well, Mr. President, your senior advisor has clearly demonstrated that he is indifferent to the welfare of the country, and is willing to sabotage that welfare in service of sheer political spite. I suspect the criminal investigation is being ably conducted.  That will all sort itself out, or not, behind the secrecy of a grand jury.  The question before us, now, is whether this latter-day Benedict Arnold should remain a close friend and valued associate of the President.  The President's decision should speak volumes about whether he puts party over principle.  Well? 6:01:48 PM    comment []

Quote for the Day, 7/11/2005   "What on earth does the fellow want to ski for?  Isn't there enough sadness in life without going out of your way to fasten long planks to your feet and jump off mountains?"   -P. G. Wodehouse, "Farewell to Legs"   I'm actually quite fond of skiing, but a good quote is a good quote. 11:31:51 AM    comment []

Rove's a Bad, Bad Man   It now seems just short of certain that Karl Rove had a direct, personal role in leaking the identity of a covert CIA operative because of a grudge against her husband.  This endangered the lives of every foreign contact she ever made; it is certainly possible that people...perhaps dozens of people...have died because of the leak, and that others sympathetic to the US in the Middle East have not come forward to help us, and will not, as a result of that leak.  But it damaged Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife's career, so it was all worth it to the Bush administration.  Whether the prosecutor can actually prove that Karl Rove knew that he was breaking the law by leaking her name was is an open question...he would have to prove that Rove knew she was a covert operative (the crime is apparently one of intent...ignorance is a defense here).  Of course, leaking her name if she wasn't covert would not harm her in any way, and the leak was clearly intended to do harm, so if Karl Rove isn't so stupid he drools into a cup, he would know that...but it may prove impossible to convince a jury of his peers that Rove doesn’t need to drool into a cup.  Idiocy is a complete defense from the charge, so any lawyer for Rove will adopt the idiot defense.  On the other hand, if he lied under oath, as he apparently has in public, about being a source for the leak, he would be guilty of perjury.  Adding further credence to Karl Rove being the source of the leak:  Rove was fired from the administration of Bush the Elder for leaking the details of a confidential meeting to, yes, Robert Novak.  Rove has always denied being the source of that leak, though, and since Rove’s a man of unquestioned integrity, that’s probably just a coincidence. I'm actually surprised by all this.  I never liked Karl Rove, but I thought at least he loved his country.  Whoops.  I was wrong. 9:04:37 AM    comment []