Plamethrower

By Crispin Sartwell

 

    Karl Rove, it turns out, was the Plamethrower. He lobbed CIA operative Valerie Plame to the press, revealing to reporters that she was a CIA operative. Thus, apparently, the administration took revenge on Plame's husband Joseph Wilson for revealing that one part of the justification for war rested on badly cooked intelligence.

    Rove's action was petty; it was vicious; but it is not clear that it was criminal. And the repercussions for Plame herself, though serious, were not disastrous.

    Thus many pro-administration commentators have dismissed the scandal as a conflagration in a teapot and accused special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald of abusing his authority.

   Plamethrower may well amount to almost nothing in the long run. It may be that Judith Miller - the New York Times reporter jailed for refusing to name her sources - will be freed, no indictments will be handed down, and the whole thing will gutter and go out.

    On the other hand, the scandal is potentially fatal to the administration.

   A recent Zogby poll indicates that about 40% of Americans think that President Bush should be impeached if he intentionally misled the American people about Iraq's weapons programs in order to manipulate us into invading Iraq.

    That number might seem high, but it's difficult to imagine anyone looking you straight in the eye and denying that lying us into a war is an impeachable offense. It would be difficult to imagine a more serious abuse of power.

   It's unlikely that actual lies will be demonstrable in this case. If there was ever a memo that said "make some stuff up," it ceased to exist a long time ago. But the scent of dung is everywhere. Colin Powell is angry about the quality of the "information" he gave to the UN, though he would have done well to examine it more critically at the time. The Downing Street memo indicates that intelligence was being created and arranged to justify the antecedent decision to invade.

   But it might not be the crime but the cover-up that proves fatal.

   The whole course of Fitzgerald's investigation suggests that there were multiple sources of the Plame leak. Otherwise, his continued pursuit of Miller appears gratuitous, since Rove has already been identified.

   This in turn suggests that anyone who was in possession of information damaging to the administration's flimsy case for war - anyone who was in a position to elucidate the various uses of aluminum tubes or to discredit the various fictional connections the administration was drawing between Saddam and al Qaeda - was subject to intimidation and reprisal.

   Indeed, it is a little hard to see what good it did anyone to take revenge on Wilson; after all, Wilson had already published his results in the New York Times; the administration's best bet and indeed their modus operandi, would have been squishy semi-denial followed by silence.

   Indeed, Rove's own story appears to be that Wilson was not sent by the White House but by Plame to check the Niger uranium story. The idea that a CIA operative is sending a former ambassador to Africa to check claims made by the president in the State oif the Union address seems bizarre. But if true it would indicate that Plame herself was very much a subversive presence within the intelligence community.

   Perhaps it was as much Plame's desire to prevent the administration from using the CIA to confirm claims that were by all accounts based on "crudely forged documents" as Wilson's publication of the results that won her Rove's antipathy.

    Either way, the only rational purpose for throwing Valerie Plame to the wolves was to show others the sort of price one might pay if one started checking stories or speaking up about the results.

     And so the Plamethrower case should immediately lead everyone - starting with Fitzgerald - to ask: who had information damaging to the administration and was blackmailed into witholding it? And who was impressed by Rove's demonstration of the price you pay?

    There is, putting it mildly, no reason to believe that no one else had information pertinent to Iraq's weapons programs and involvement with terrorism that contradicted the administration's justifications for invasion.  And there is no reason to believe that anyone who had such information would be treated more gently than Plame and Wilson.

    If even one more such case arises, this administration should collapse like a house of cards.

    Blackmailing and punishing critics and dissidents would demonstrate a broad totalitarian streak in this administration and would probably constitute a series of crimes.

    But most importantly, it would leave no one in any doubt that the original pretexts for war were fabrications, because there is no other reason for repressing the information.

   Thus, Plamethrower could - I emphasize could - mutate from technicality to one of the great scandals in the history of the republic.