Karl Rove, Traitor

Karl Rove, Traitor

by Hunter

Thu Jun 23rd, 2005 at 15:34:11 PDT

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. [...]

Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.

  -- Karl Rove

"I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife was fair game."

    -- MSNBC host Chris Matthews, in a phone call to Ambassador Joseph Wilson after the exposure of Wilson's wife as an undercover CIA operative.

If there is one person in America that should shy away from making declarations about the motives of liberals, it is Karl Rove. We still do not know who, in the Plame case, committed the initial crime of "outing" the identity of a CIA agent working undercover on weapons of mass destruction. But we do know who took point on gaining maximum exposure of that information, by "shopping" it to a wide selection of perceived-friendly conservative news figures in an attempt to make the results as widespread and damaging as possible.

That person was Karl Rove, and the goal was to use the criminal exposure of an American agent as Republican political capital for the White House. The exposure was from that point on coordinated as a means of punishment against a political opponent -- and as a very public warning against any other American officials or intelligence agents that might come forward with opinions that conflicted with the Bush Administration statements in the runup to the Iraq War.

The complicity of media figures such as Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell, and the execrable Robert Novak  (who has shared a long and storied history benefitting from Rove-provided leaks) was reason enough for most media outlets to treat the story delicately, though it did get play (even, hilariously, from some of the media figures that refused to acknowledge their own roles while gamely interviewing others about the leaks.)  But there's nothing delicate about the story.

After the catastrophic destruction of 9/11 in New York City and Washington, during a time of war, during ongoing operations in Afghanistan, during fevered investigations into the possibility of al-Qaeda or other terrorist cells gaining access to weapons of mass destruction, members of the Bush Administration chose to "out" a deep-cover agent working against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in retailation for a perceived political slight by her husband. In the process of the outing, the Administration destroyed the cover of the energy company she ostensibly worked for, ended her covert career, and endangered every foreign source and contact that she and her fellow agents had been involved with.

It was, unambiguously, an act of treason in a time of war. And one that Bush Administration officials intentionally inflicted upon her, and upon the country. And one that Karl Rove, White House political director, played a key and unapologetic role in. Whether or not Rove was the original source of the leak to Novak himself, it is astonishing that we live in a political climate where politically piggybacking off such a crime is not considered a fireable offense. Such is the nature of the Bush White House.

We do not know who the original leaker was, in the Plame case, for one simple reason: the White House has chosen to block investigation of the matter. Phone records from the offices in question are easily obtainable; the numbers of individuals with access to the information number perhaps in the half-dozen range; the President himself could, in the interest of national security, demand of his staff that they expose the leaker. Instead, the President has "lawyered up", and presented the country with hollow-eyed, slackjawed silence in the whole affair.  With each passing revelation, it becomes more clear that there were a host of senior administration officials tasked with retribution against intelligence analysts and agencies who dared go against the Bush Administration "preferred" analyses of Iraq.

In one of the many ironies of the Plame case, Plame herself was transferred back to Washington D.C. in 1997, where she met Wilson, for fears her cover had been blown by double agent Aldrich Ames. As it turned out, Ames didn't out her.

But members of the Bush Administration, seeking payback against her "Democrat" husband, did.

Karl Rove knows all about putting American troops, and American citizens, in danger. And for that, he deserves a contempt beyond that which it is possible for mere words to describe.

...according to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, leaking the name of an undercover agent is also a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, under certain circumstances. When tv commentator Chris Matthews asked Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie if he thought such a leak made by government officials was "worse than Watergate," Gillespie replied, "Yeah, I suppose in terms of the real-world implications of it."

-- Vanity Fair, January 2004

 

If people only knew the facts, they would not be fighting for the 'RIGHT' to be screwed over.

+ $1,751,132,130,359 Social Security Trust Fund
– $7,805,708,317,936 The Gross National Debt

Time will tell all the Truth.

VT