Spy vs. Spy: Valerie Plame

"Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors."
-- George H. W. Bush, 1999

"Those who win in a rigged game get stupid."
-- Catherine Austin Fitts, assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the first Bush administration

 

www.pubrecord.org/index.php?view=article&catid=1%3Anationworld&id=77%3Acheneys-handwritten-notes-implicate-bush-in-plame-affair&option=com_content&Itemid=8

Cheney's Handwritten Notes Implicate Bush In Plame Affair
By Jason Leopold
The Public Record
May 30, 2008


www.commondreams.org/views07/0306-38.htm
Published on Tuesday, March 6, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Libbygate: Now Let's Get to the Real Story
by Dave Lindorff

So Scooter Libby has taken the fall.
Three and a half years and a long bloody war after he and a gang of war-mongers in the White House and Blair House, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, set out to undermine and trash the reputation of an Iraq war critic, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, Libby has been found guilty of perjury, lying to the FBI and obstruction of justice by a Washington jury.
Now maybe special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and what passes for journalists in the mainstream media can get down to the real business of finding out just why the entire White House smear operation was unleashed upon a minor state department official and why they went so far as to violate federal law and expose his CIA-operative wife, Valerie Plame, in the process destroying her entire network of contacts for monitoring the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

 

www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030707R.shtml
Why Cheney Lost It When Joe Wilson Spoke Out
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Wednesday 07 March 2007

 

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Outed_CIA_officer_was_working_on_0213.html

Outed CIA officer was working on Iran, intelligence sources say
Larisa Alexandrovna
Published: February 13, 2006
The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, RAW STORY has learned.
According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Rove

While the breaking of Valerie Plame's cover as a NOC operative of the CIA may be regarded as serious in and of itself, there has been some speculation that the damage caused by the leak may extend in very specific directions related to Plame's work with her cover company, Brewster Jennings & Associates. While the majority of commentators felt that her husband was the target for the smear, a body of evidence points to another motive for the leak. The leak may have been instigated as a move to end Plame's work spying on the Saudi royal family, and more specifically her investigation into whether the Saudi oilfields had passed their peak of productivity (see peak oil). In this view (found for example in Michael Ruppert's From The Wilderness news service) the leak was an attempt to silence and/or discredit Plame's findings on the state of the world's oil supply, thereby impairing the functioning of the CIA's ability to inform the administration, in turn reducing its ability to act usefully.


www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/060804_coup_detat.html

COUP D'ETAT:
The Real Reason Tenet and Pavitt Resigned from the CIA on June 3rd and 4th
Bush, Cheney Indictments in Plame Case Looming
by
Michael C. Ruppert
additional reporting by
Wayne Madsen from Washington
© Copyright 2004, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.
JUNE 8, 2004

excerpt:

Not only was Plame's cover blown, so was that of her cover company, Brewster, Jennings & Associates. With the public exposure of Plame, intelligence agencies all over the world started searching data bases for any references to her (TIME Magazine). Damage control was immediate, as the CIA asserted that her mission had been connected to weapons of mass destruction.
However, it was not long before stories from the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal tied Brewster, Jennings & Associates to energy, oil and the Saudi-owned Arabian American Oil Company, or ARAMCO. Brewster Jennings had been a founder of Mobil Oil company, one of Aramco's principal founders.
According to additional sources interviewed by Wayne Madsen, Brewster Jennings was, in fact, a well-established CIA proprietary company, linked for many years to ARAMCO. The demise of Brewster Jennings was also guaranteed the moment Plame was outed.
It takes years for Non-Official Covers or NOCs, as they are known, to become really effective. Over time, they become gradually more trusted; they work their way into deeper information access from more sensitive sources. NOCs are generally regarded in the community as among the best and most valuable of all CIA operations officers and the agency goes to great lengths to protect them in what are frequently very risky missions.
By definition, Valerie Plame was an NOC. Yet unlike all other NOCs who fear exposure and torture or death from hostile governments and individual targets who have been judged threats to the United States, she got done in by her own President, whom we also judge to be a domestic enemy of the United States.
Moreover, as we will see below, Valerie Plame may have been one of the most important NOCs the CIA had in the current climate. Let's look at just how valuable she was.

ARAMCO
According to an April 29, 2002 report in Britain's Guardian, ARAMCO constitutes 12% of the world's total oil production; a figure which has certainly increased as other countries have progressed deeper into irreversible decline.
ARAMCO is the largest oil group in the world, a state-owned Saudi company in partnership with four major US oil companies. Another one of Aramco’s partners is Chevron-Texaco which gave up one of its board members, Condoleezza Rice, when she became the National Security Advisor to George Bush. All of ARAMCO’s key decisions are made by the Saudi royal family while US oil expertise, personnel and technology keeps the cash coming in and the oil going out. ARAMCO operates, manages, and maintains virtually all Saudi oil fields – 25% of all the oil on the planet.
It gets better.
According to a New York Times report on March 8th of this year, ARAMCO is planning to make a 25% investment in a new and badly needed refinery to produce gasoline. The remaining 75% ownership of the refinery will go to the only nation that is quickly becoming America's major world competitor for ever-diminishing supplies of oil: China.
Almost the entire Bush administration has an interest in ARAMCO.
The Boston Globe reported that in 2001 ARAMCO had signed a $140 million multi-year contract with Halliburton, then chaired by Dick Cheney, to develop a new oil field. Halliburton does a lot of business in Saudi Arabia. Current estimates of Halliburton contracts or joint ventures in the country run into the tens of billions of dollars.
So do the fortunes of some shady figures from the Bush family's past.
As recently as 1991 ARAMCO had Khalid bin Mahfouz sitting on its Supreme Council or board of directors. Mahfouz, Saudi Arabia's former treasurer and the nation's largest banker, has been reported in several places to be Osama bin Laden's brother in law. However, he has denied this and brought intense legal pressure to bear demanding retractions of these allegations. He has major partnership investments with the multi-billion dollar Binladin Group of companies and he is a former director of BCCI, the infamous criminal drug-money laundering bank which performed a number of very useful services for the CIA before its 1991 collapse under criminal investigation by a whole lot of countries.
As Saudi Arabia's largest banker he handles the accounts of the royal family and - no doubt - ARAMCO, while at the same time he is a named defendant in a $1 trillion lawsuit filed by 9/11 victim families against the Saudi government and prominent Saudi officials who, the suit alleges, were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.
Both BCCI and Mahfouz have historical connections to the Bush family dating back to the 1980s. Another bank (one of many) connected to Mahfouz - the InterMaritime Bank - bailed out a cash-starved Harken Energy in 1987 with $25 million. After the rejuvenated Harken got a no-bid oil lease in 1991, CEO George W. Bush promptly sold his shares in a pump-and-dump scheme and made a whole lot of money.
Knowing all of this, there's really no good reason why the CIA should be too upset, is there? It was only a long-term proprietary and deep-cover NOC - well established and consistently producing "take" from ARAMCO (and who knows what else in Saudi Arabia). It was destroyed with a motive of personal vengeance (there may have been other motives) by someone inside the White House.
From the CIA's point of view, at a time when Saudi Arabia is one of the three or four countries of highest interest to the US, the Plame operation was irreplaceable.


www.thebrigg.net/?p=10

August 29, 2005
Valerie Plame and intel into Saudi Arabia
Filed under: Politics, Energy and Science, Global — Administrator @ 12:42 pm
Over the past couple decades, as global oil demand has increased, and we have neared the point at which global oil production will peak (an inherent requirement of using a depletable fossil fuel), trying to maintain intelligence information on the true state of the oil industries of foreign countries has been a key priority of the CIA. If a country’s oil reserves are substantially lower than what they are publically saying, our leaders need/want to know, to prefer for a pending shortfall. Also, with many nations, the oil industries are owned and run by the government - so gathering intel from within their oil industry translates to gathering intel about many parts of the government, including military issues (such as WMDs).
At least 10 years ago, the CIA created a “front operation” - a company that was secretly run by the CIA, and that built close ties with the oil industries of other nations as a means of gathering intel from within the country. This “cover company” was known as Brewster, Jennings & Associates (BJA). It took years for this cover company to really start paying off as far as intel, since it took time for the foreign countries and companies they worked with to start trusting them. A key company BJA worked with was ARAMCO - Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, which supplies somewhere around 12% of global oil production.


http://citizenspook.blogspot.com


6/25/04
GRAND JURY WILL SOON ISSUE EXPLOSIVE INDICTMENTS
- In "Coup d'Etat," Mike Ruppert showed that Valerie Plame was no ordinary CIA employee; her work was part of at least one productive and well-established information gathering operation. In this latest report on the unfolding Plame investigation, Wayne Madsen shows what a long list of CIA people and projects have been compromised by the leak. John "Karl Rove" Doe and John "Dick Cheney" Doe seem to have no idea what kind of hibernating grizzly bear they've been jabbing at. They'll find out now, because it just woke up.


The 1982 "Intelligence Identities Protection Act" makes it a felony to reveal the fact that someone is a covert government operative. It is surreal to see "peace activists" endorse this law (unintentionally?), even though it would apply if a peace group discovered a covert operative in their group and sought to expose that person. The IIPA was signed by Reagan to stop CounterSpy magazine and Covert Action Information Bulletin from revealing any more names of spooks masquerading as diplomats. Their actions, which did not result in anyone being harmed, did lots to thwart illegal covert operations by the US government. Thousands were exposed, making the CIA somewhat less effective.

 

see also "Journalism and the CIA" www.namebase.org/news17.html

 

www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=30695

Outing CIA Agents
Valerie Plame Meets Philip Agee
By Steve Weissman

 

www.commondreams.org/views05/0719-32.htm

Published on Tuesday, July 19, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Why “White House v. Wilson/Plame” Matters
by Ray McGovern

 

www.commondreams.org/views05/0719-20.htm

Published on Tuesday, July 19, 2005 by the Boston Globe
Link to Cheney Deepens ‘Leak-Gate’ Scandal
by Derrick Z. Jackson

 

www.consortiumnews.com/2005/071105.html

Rove's Leak Points to Bush Conspiracy
By Robert Parry
July 11, 2005


Craig Crawford - Congressional Quarterly

http://crawfordslist.blogspot.com - July 10, 2005

"If Karl Rove planned this -- which I doubt -- he really is a genius:
"1.) He leaks to Time's Matt Cooper in such a way that he avoids the law's intent requirement for criminal liability (Newsweek notes that Cooper's email shows nothing indicating Rove knew or revealed that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent, only that she worked at the CIA).
"2.) The ensuing grand jury investigation dramatically weakens the news media and future leakers, as reporters must decide whether to testify or go to jail, and even turns Rove's foes in the public against the reporters involved because they are seen as protecting him.
"In other words, by making himself a protected source who loses that protection, Rove makes it easier for the government to use federal courts to target all leakers. This would give Machiavelli a migraine."

more coverage at www.cq.com/public/crawford_current.html


www.namebase.org/sources/AG.html
Agee, Philip. Inside the Company: CIA Diary. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1975. 640 pages.
In 1968 Philip Agee was finally disgusted with his dirty work as a CIA officer in Ecuador, Uruguay, and Mexico. He submitted a letter of resignation and immediately slipped into Cuba, then went to France and Britain. As he wrote his memoirs while scraping by on handouts, he frequently wondered if some of the people who were helping him could be trusted. The answer was "no" -- a typewriter that one friend loaned him was discovered to contain a homing transmitter. Finally his book "Inside the Company" was published in 1975, launching his career as history's most celebrated anti-CIA activist. The CIA kept harassing Agee, even though he retains his U.S. citizenship and has never been charged with a crime. He was expelled from Britain, France, and Holland, and his U.S. passport was revoked in 1979. Today he lives in Germany, is still trying to get his passport back, and does speaking tours on U.S. college campuses.
"Inside the Company" became an instant international bestseller, with many printings in many languages. It is universally regarded as accurate and reliable, and is still widely available. Essentially a reconstructed month-by-month diary of his CIA work, it names the people he worked with and provides a disgusting chronicle of the dirty tricks used by the CIA to keep American interests secure.

www.namebase.org/sources/KM.html
Agee, Philip. On the Run. Secaucus NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1987. 400 pages.
In 1968 Philip Agee was finally disgusted with his dirty work as a CIA officer in Ecuador, Uruguay, and Mexico. He submitted a letter of resignation and immediately slipped into Cuba, then went to France and Britain. As he wrote his memoirs while scraping by on handouts, he frequently wondered if some of the people who were helping him could be trusted. The answer was "no" -- a typewriter that one friend loaned him was discovered to contain a homing transmitter. Finally his book "Inside the Company" was published in 1975, launching his career as history's most celebrated anti-CIA activist. The CIA kept harassing Agee, even though he retains his U.S. citizenship and has never been charged with a crime. He was expelled from Britain, France, and Holland, and his U.S. passport was revoked in 1979. Today he lives in Germany, is still trying to get his passport back, and does speaking tours on U.S. college campuses.
While "Inside the Company" chronicles Agee's activities as a CIA officer, "On the Run" is part two of his autobiography. It covers the years between his resignation and the publication of his memoirs, and the succession of legal problems in a number of European countries once he became a celebrity. Besides reading almost like a thriller, this book is also valuable as a history of the anti-CIA movement.

www.namebase.org/sources/CL.html
CounterSpy (1973-1984)
CounterSpy published 32 issues from 1973 to 1984, a special issue on Jordan in 1977, and 8 issues as The National Reporter from 1985 to 1988. Back issues are no longer available except through the PIR photocopying service.
This little magazine had a stormy history. After they started printing names of CIA officers around the world, a station chief was assassinated in 1975 by urban guerrillas in Athens. CounterSpy found itself under attack by what appeared to be an orchestrated U.S. media -- or perhaps it was simply pack journalism. Their struggle to keep publishing was not always successful.
More than once this was where you read it first. The station chief in Costa Rica, Joseph F. Fernandez, first appeared in CounterSpy in 1975, even while the Washington Post was sticking with his pseudonym up until the day he was indicted in 1988. And the National Endowment for Democracy, finally recognized for its role in buying the Nicaraguan election in 1990, was first exposed in The National Reporter by editor John Kelly in 1986. This magazine will be missed by those who feel that they need to know.

Covert Action Information Bulletin, 1500 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Suite 732, Washington DC 20005, Tel: 202-331-9763, Fax: 202-331-9751. Subs ($22/year) and back issues ($8/ea) are available from CAQ.
Covert Action Information Bulletin began publishing in 1978, and currently issues a well-produced quarterly of about 70 pages with no advertising. Some themes include CIA in academia, the new world order, CIA in Eastern Europe, George Bush, domestic surveillance, CIA and drugs, AIDS, the religious right, and the Nazi-Vatican-CIA nexus. Most articles contain plenty of footnotes. Most names from almost every issue through 1992 (Number 42) are in NameBase; since Number 43 the magazine changed its name to Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ) and the indexing in NameBase has been more selective.
Before 1982, this publication was best known for its "Naming Names" column, which tracked CIA officers under diplomatic cover by researching the State Department Biographic Register and the diplomatic lists issued by the U.S. and other countries. This finally became illegal when Reagan signed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. CAIB was forced to drop this column and also became generally more cautious on the matter of CIA names. One foreign publication is continuing the earlier tradition, but CAIB/CAQ's reputation for quality, consistency, and accuracy make it a hard act to follow.


http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_xymphora_archive.html#106497883590607017

Tuesday, September 30, 2003
While I suppose it is fun to use the Wilson/Plame/Rove situation to attack the Bushites, and the incident may create a short-term partisan advantage for those opposed to the junta, and it would be very nice to see Rove do the perp walk, Cryptome has a much deeper truth:

"The idiot furor over naming Valerie Plame as a CIA officer, and the CIA's phony call for an investigation, should not obscure the need to name as many intelligence officers and agents as possible. It is a hoary canard - long-practiced intelligence disinformation - that naming these persons places their life in jeopardy. On the contrary, not identifying them places far more lives in jeopardy from their vile, secret operations and the overthrow plots they advance. These officers, their agencies and governmental funders want their names kept secret so they do not have to face retribution for cowardly misdeeds they are fearful of executing openly."

It is impossible to disagree with one word of this. There is certainly a great deal of irony in the continuing pattern that the Bushites make all their political hay on purporting to fight the 'war on terror', while simultaneously doing everything they can to subvert that war, in this case rendering ineffective an operative who was working on combating weapons of mass destruction. But the contradictions are everywhere. Bush can destroy the economy with his tax cuts, starve social programs, allow corporadoes to rape the country, destroy the environment, and start an illegal and immoral and extraordinarily expensive war, and nobody seems to care. When the CIA is insulted, suddenly it becomes a national issue. It was inevitable that the arrogance and stupidity of the Bush Administration thugs would lead to their picking on a foe who could fight back, but the CIA reaction shouldn't obscure the fact that this isn't a battle of Good against Evil, but just a contest to determine the greater of two Evils. While Democrats piously develop a concern for the well-being of CIA employees, some of these same employees are working right now to subvert the democratically-elected government of Venezuela.


www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/120503_rove.html
EDITORIAL
05 December 2003
KARL ROVE: THE KING OF DIRT
The Turd Blossom's Chickens May Come To Roost
By Wayne Madsen
(Special to From The Wilderness)
© Copyright 2003, From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. All
Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web
site for non-profit purposes only.

December 5, 2003 100 PDT (FTW) -- After many years as a privacy advocate and
author of privacy books, I now reluctantly believe that there's one citizen of
the United States who is not entitled to any privacy or solitude, but should
be subjected to a relentless campaign of intimidation, harassment, and
knavery. In other words, patriotic Americans who believe in fair play should
-- within the bounds of the law -- make this person's life a living hell.
The target for such a campaign is Karl Rove, George W. Bush's political
Svengali, and the chief instigator of character assassination campaigns
against those who challenge the policies of the Bush administration.
Democrats, progressives and the liberally inclined must learn to fight fire
with fire, Rove tactics against Rove tactics. This evil practitioner of
political chicanery earned his stripes first as an apprentice of Richard
Nixon's dirty trickster, Donald Segretti. Rove then went on to hone and refine
his duplicitous craft under Republican National Committee chairmen George H.
W. Bush, Lee Atwater, and, finally, George W. Bush (who affectionately and
alternately calls Rove his "boy genius" and "turd blossom").
After trashing the personal character of former Texas Democratic Governors
Mark White and Ann Richards, Texas Democratic Representative Lloyd Doggett,
and Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, Rove now uses his Felix the
Cat-like bag of dirty tricks to assassinate the characters of noble and
non-political men and women. It is clearly time to take action against Rove,
and give this maniac a taste of his own bitter medicine.
Over the years, Rove has relied on the planting of bogus stories in the media,
production of counterfeit documents, the theft of campaign materials and
internal documents, production of false witnesses, electronic eavesdropping,
misuse of government resources, unethical political polling techniques,
intimidation of minority voters, and "whispering campaigns" to advance the
sordid agenda of the neo-conservative, extreme right wing of the Republican Party.
Rove reached his outrage limit with me when Iraq war veteran and prisoner of
war Private Jessica Lynch accused the Bush administration and the neo-con
Pentagon of hyping her capture for blatant political purposes. Regarding the
Hollywood-like production used by White House and Pentagon propagandists to
document her rescue from an Iraqi hospital, where she was receiving medical
treatment for her injuries (and not abuse by Iraqi soldiers), Lynch told ABC
News, "Yeah, it does [bother me]. It does that they used me as a way to
symbolize all this stuff," Lynch said, "I mean, yeah, it's wrong ... I don't
know what they had ... or why they filmed it."
The despicable Rove character assassination machinery soon went into full
gear. First, gargoyle-like neo-con commentators such as Charles Krauthammer
began criticizing Lynch for selling her book rights and accused her of
hypocrisy. Then came reports (unproved and largely dismissed) that Lynch had
been sexually molested while being held captive. Then the Rove coup de grace:
news that Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine had obtained topless photos of Lynch
frolicking with two other male soldiers before deploying to Iraq in early
2001. The photos were reportedly taken deep in the heart of Rove's Texas at
Fort Bliss. To his credit, Flynt realized that by publishing the photos he
would be playing into Rove's hands, and he decided to secure them. Poor
Jessica found out what it is like to go from America's wholesome young heroine
to an accused tart. All this, merely for confronting the evil Karl Rove.
Jessica was not the first innocent person to incur the wrath of Rove's
maniacal filth machine, but she needs to be the last.
Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his CIA undercover operative wife, Valerie Plame
Wilson, also discovered what it was like to be at the receiving end of a Rove
dirty tricks campaign. Wilson, who challenged assertions that Iraq sought
yellow cake uranium from Niger, was soon pilloried as a partisan political
hack seeking the limelight. His wife, Valerie, saw her undercover CIA
operation, Brewster Jennings Associates, exposed by Rove's other favorite
media gargoyle, Bob Novak. It is almost certain that Rove or one of his
deputies provided the classified information to Novak. Wilson later said
nothing would make him happier than seeing Karl Rove "frog marched" out of the
White House in handcuffs.
Here, here!
Then there was former UN weapons inspector, former Marine Corps officer Scott
Ritter. A vocal opponent of the Iraq war, he found himself subject to criminal
charges (later summarily dismissed) of improper chat room communications with
an undercover cop, posing as a minor, on the Internet. Not only was the case
dismissed by a New York State judge, but the transcript was ordered sealed,
the usual response when unfounded charges are brought against a person. Still,
someone mysteriously unsealed the transcript and leaked it to the press.
Ritter similarly discovered what personal harm Rove's political machine can do
to those it doesn't like.
Independent-minded Pentagon flag rank officers, from retired Marine Corps
General Anthony Zinni to Iraqi War commander General Tommy Franks, have also
been on the receiving end of Rove's torrents of abuse and disinformation;
Zinni for being outspoken against the war, and Franks for disagreeing with
awarding to Silver Star to Lynch. Army Specialist Clinton Deitz of the 2nd
Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division told ABC News, "If Donald Rumsfeld was
here, I'd ask him for his resignation." Deitz and other soldiers opposed to
the insane war were then threatened with court martial by the chickenhawks
surrounding Rumsfeld, who were undoubtedly egged on by the demonic Rove.
Another 2nd Brigade Sergeant was more pointed when he said, "I've got my own
'Most Wanted' list" of senior Bush administration officials." Sarge, it would
not be a complete list without Rove's name on it.
It now appears that former Iraqi proconsul, retired General Jay Garner, was
tossed overboard because he disagreed with the disbanding of the Iraqi army.
Heresy! He was replaced with the much more sycophantic and dapper L. Paul
Bremer III, who played emcee for Bush's Turkey Trot at Baghdad airport.
Others have also faced recriminations from Rove's "Matrix" system of political
retribution and retaliation. They include State Department diplomats John H.
Brown, John Brady Kiesling, and Mary Wright, all of whom resigned over the
war. They were described as low ranking malcontents by the White House
spinmeisters. Another target was former State Department Bureau of
Intelligence and Research (INR) officer Greg Thielmann who spoke about how
intelligence was skewed by the neo-cons.
It is not known whether Thielmann's colleague at INR, John Kokal, also voiced
concerns about similar issues. We will never know, because tragically, Kokal's
shoeless body was discovered in a 20 feet window well, 8 floors below the top
of the State Department building early in the evening of November 7th.
Contrary to what the State Department said about Kokal, senior State
Department sources report that not only was the diplomat a top Iraq
specialist, he regularly briefed Secretary of State Colin Powell. The Kokal
incident is too reminiscent of the alleged suicide of British Ministry of
Defense weapons of mass destruction expert, Dr. David Kelly (who is said to
have committed suicide with a dull pen knife and over the counter drugs).
Kokal was the first foreign affairs official found dead at the bottom of a
foreign ministry since Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk's body was
found in the courtyard below his window in 1948. Masaryk's defenestration
preceded the total Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia.
I would hope that Rove would not resort to that kind of political retribution,
but in an era when the battle cry is, "If you're not with us, you're against
us," who really knows? Would Rove let his Machiavellian attitude dictate more
extreme forms of retaliation? Let's hope not, but we shouldn't be surprised if
it is otherwise the case.
Because just as the Kokal matter was fading into oblivion, the United Nations
headquarters reported that on December 1, an American, Michael Holton, a
16-year veteran of its security police, was found shot to death inside the UN
headquarters in New York. It was the first incident of its kind in the history
of the UN. The head of the UN security department said there was "no prior
indication of psychological problems and that no note was left near the body .
. . there were no witnesses and no one was known to have heard anything
unusual." Yes, there's a lot of that happening as of late.
It was from Rove's shop that a CD-ROM containing a White House PowerPoint
campaign strategy miraculously was "found" in Lafayette Park across from the
White House. Ken Mehlman, Rove's accomplice in the planted park CD scam, is
now Bush's 2004 campaign manager. A strategy paper from the Senate
Intelligence Committee's Democratic minority staff suddenly wound up in the
hands of GOP radio demagogue Sean Hannity. A Republican staffer for the Senate
Judiciary Committee was caught hacking into sensitive Democratic files. Also,
consider the bogus intelligence documents pointing to Iraq trying to obtain
uranium from Africa. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Rove accused the
Democrats of secretly videotaping a Bush debate practice session. All smoke
and mirrors designed by Rove to mask his special brand of political conniving.
Rove's brand of subterfuge and chicanery is copied from his Teutonic cousins
who practiced it so well in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s.
Was it a coincidence that former Vice President Al Gore (the de jure President
of the United States) was subjected twice to special baggage searches at
airports during a campaign swing to Wisconsin? No, that was again Rove at
work. Just like when Rove and ex-Orkin exterminator Tom DeLay misused
Department of Homeland Security, Federal Aviation Administration, and FBI
personnel in a search for absent members of the Texas House of
Representatives. Then there was the story that leaked to the press about
California Governor Gray Davis physically abusing a female staff member. Gray
Davis? The man who was likened to Casper Milquetoast, all of a sudden acting
like Arnold Schwarzenegger! More Rove fingerprints -- the Davis story appeared
as Schwarzenegger was fending off allegations of groping females over his long
movie career.
The late FBI counterterrorism agent John P. O'Neill had a briefcase containing
some sensitive documents stolen from him as he was attending a retirement
planning session in Tampa. The briefcase was later returned with nothing
missing. But soon the news of the "stolen briefcase" was leaked to the press,
and O'Neill faced his first FBI investigation in his 30-year career. The
incident smells of Rove all over it. O'Neill, who was on to the Bush family
relationship with Saudis who, in turn, backed Al Qaeda, ironically died at the
World Trade Center on 9/11.
The serpentine Rove has directed his venom against a number of international
personages as well -- from French President Jacques Chirac and German
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, to former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix
and International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohammed El Baradei, to former
South African President Nelson Mandela and Canadian Prime Minister Jean
Chrétien. All had opposed the Bush march to war.
I have become aware of journalistic colleagues being mugged (without any theft
involved) on the streets of Washington and London. Could these have been
warnings to those who have written extensively about the misdeeds of the Bush
cabal? Possibly. As the United States continues to sink into a Third
World-style dictatorship, we can expect more harassment of journalists and
political activists.
Unless, that is, Rove is deep-sixed as a matter of political necessity to
shore up Bush's Christian Right base. Washington is awash with stories,
including those from the normally pro-Bush conservative Washington Times
group, of Rove's Hooveresque off-hours antics (as in J. Edgar Hoover). Gee,
Karl, how are you going to square that with the good Reverends Robertson and
Falwell?
Stay tuned.
__________
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author,
syndicated columnist, and a long-time advocate for privacy and civil
liberties. He testified before Cynthia McKinney's hearing on the genocide in
the DRC in May 2001 and has worked with Bob Barr on privacy legislation in the
past.