The White House, the CIA, and the Wilsons
The chain of events that gave rise to a grand jury investigation.
by Stephen F. Hayes
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/217wnmrb.asp

FOR TWO YEARS, THE political class in Washington has followed with intense interest the story of Joseph Wilson and the events that led to the compromising of his wife's identity and undercover status as a CIA operative. The rest of the country seems to have responded with a collective yawn. That will soon change if special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues indictments of senior White House aides in his investigation of the alleged leaking of Mrs. Wilson's name.

The narrative constructed to date by the mainstream media is uncomplicated: The White House exaggerated claims of Iraq's efforts to obtain uranium from Niger despite objections from the CIA and the broader U.S. intelligence community. In the late spring of 2003, Joseph Wilson laid bare this White House deception with firsthand accounts of his involvement in the intelligence-gathering. Bush administration officials quickly became obsessed with Wilson, and their anger drove them to retaliate, exposing Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, by leaking her identity to reporters.

Think this is oversimplified? Here is a Washington Post summary of the events leading up to the investigation, from July 27, 2005:


[Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald] began his probe in December 2003 to determine whether any government official knowingly leaked Plame's identity as a CIA employee to the media. Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, has said his wife's career was ruined in retaliation for his public criticism of Bush. In a 2002 trip to Niger at the request of the CIA, Wilson found no evidence to support allegations that Iraq was seeking uranium from that African country and reported back to the agency in February 2002. But nearly a year later, Bush asserted in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa, attributing it to British, not U.S., intelligence.
Simple. Clean. And very misleading. The real story is considerably more complicated.

ON OCTOBER 15, 2001, the CIA received a report from a foreign government service that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein had struck a deal with the government of Niger to purchase several tons of partially processed uranium, known as "yellowcake." The first report was met with some skepticism. The CIA found the substance of the report plausible but expressed concern about its sourcing. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) was more dubious. INR thought it unlikely that the government of Niger would take the substantial risks involved in doing illicit business with a rogue regime. INR analysts also expressed doubt that the transaction could have taken place because the uranium mines in Niger are controlled by a French consortium, which would be reluctant to work with Saddam Hussein--an objection that seems naive with the benefit of hindsight.

On October 18, 2001, the CIA published a Senior Executive Intelligence Bulletin that discussed the finding. "According to a foreign government service, Niger as of early this year planned to send several tons of uranium to Iraq under an agreement concluded late last year." The report noted the sourcing: "There is no corroboration from other sources that such an agreement was reached or that uranium was transferred."

Several months later came a second report, dated February 5, 2002, also from a "foreign government service." It contained more details of the alleged transaction. An official from the CIA's directorate of operations said that the new information came from "a very credible source," and some of the reporting seemed to corroborate earlier accounts of meetings between Nigerien officials and Iraqis. The State Department's INR remained skeptical, judging that the Iraqis were unlikely to engage in such illicit trade because they were "bound to be caught."

Analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency wrote a report using the new information entitled "Niamey signed an agreement to sell 500 tons of uranium a year to Baghdad." It was published internally on February 12, 2002, and included in the daily intelligence briefing prepared for Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney asked his CIA briefer for more information, including the CIA's analysis of the report. The CIA filed a perfunctory response to the vice president's request, noting some concerns about the report and promising to follow up. It is unclear whether Cheney saw this response.

The promised CIA follow-up came quickly. That same day officials at the agency's Counterproliferation Division discussed how they might investigate further. An employee of the division, Valerie Wilson, suggested the agency send her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador to Gabon with experience in Niger, to Africa to make inquiries. In a memo to the deputy director of the Counterproliferation Division, she wrote: "My husband has good relations with the PM [prime minister of Niger] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." Mrs. Wilson would later say she asked her husband, on behalf of the CIA, if he would investigate "this crazy report" on a uranium deal between Iraq and Niger. Wilson agreed to go.

On February 18, 2002, the U.S. embassy in Niger sent a cable describing a new account of the alleged deal. The account, it said, "provides sufficient detail to warrant another hard look at Niger's uranium sales." The cable further warned against dismissing the allegations prematurely. The following day, back at Langley, representatives of several U.S. intelligence agencies met with Ambassador Wilson to discuss the trip. Contemporaneous notes from an analyst at the State Department's INR suggest that Mrs. Wilson "apparently convened" the meeting. She introduced her husband to the group and left a short time later. Several of the attendees would later recall questioning the value of the proposed trip, noting that the Nigeriens were unlikely to admit dealing with the Iraqis. Still, the CIA approved the trip.

Here is how Wilson would later recall his investigation in his now-famous New York Times op-ed.


In late February 2002, I arrived in Niger's capital, Niamey, where I had been a diplomat in the mid-70s and visited as a National Security Council official in the late 90s. The city was much as I remembered it. Seasonal winds had clogged the air with dust and sand. Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger River (over the John F. Kennedy bridge), the setting sun behind them. Most people had wrapped scarves around their faces to protect against the grit, leaving only their eyes visible.

Wilson met with U.S. Ambassador to Niger Barbara Owens-Kirkpatrick, who, like the State Department's intelligence bureau, thought the alleged sale unlikely. Wilson continued:


I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.
Wilson was debriefed by two CIA officials at his home on March 5, 2002. He never filed a written report. The resulting CIA report was published and disseminated in the regular intelligence stream three days later. The report included the unsurprising declaration of former Nigerien prime minister Ibrahim Mayaki that Niger had signed no contracts with rogue states while he served first as foreign minister and then prime minister, from 1996 to 1999. But Mayaki added one tantalizing detail, also included in the CIA report that resulted from Wilson's trip. An Iraqi delegation had visited Niger in 1999 to explore "expanding commercial relations" between Iraq and Niger. Mayaki had met with the Iraqis and later concluded that their request for enhanced trade meant they wanted to discuss purchasing uranium. Mayaki said he had not pursued the matter because such deals were prohibited under U.N. sanctions.

Reactions to the report differed. The INR analyst believed Wilson's report supported his assessment that deals between Iraq and Niger were unlikely. Analysts at the CIA thought the Wilson report added little to the overall knowledge of the Iraq-Niger allegations but noted with particular interest the visit of the Iraqi delegation in 1999. That report may have seemed noteworthy because of the timing of the Iraqi visit. The CIA had several previous reports of Iraq seeking uranium in Africa in 1999, specifically from Congo and Somalia.

On balance, then, Wilson's trip seemed to several analysts to make the original claims of an Iraq-Niger deal more plausible.

Throughout the spring and summer, finished intelligence products from several U.S. intelligence agencies cited the reporting on Iraq and Niger as evidence that the Iraqis were continuing their pursuit of nuclear weapons. Some of these noted the doubts of the skeptics, while others were more aggressive in their analysis. A September 2002 DIA paper, for instance, was titled Iraq's Reemerging Nuclear Program. It declared: "Iraq has been vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake."

THE WHITE HOUSE began to take its case against Iraq to the American public beginning in the late summer of 2002. Vice President Cheney warned of the threat from Iraq in a stern speech in Nashville on August 26. Behind the scenes at the White House, communications officials developed talking points and fact sheets for administration officials and their surrogates. Most of these included the Iraq-Niger intelligence, and all of them were cleared by the CIA.

The CIA also cleared several references to the Iraq-Niger intelligence--some more direct than others--for use in speeches written for President Bush. This language was cleared by the CIA on September 11, 2002:


We also know this: within the past few years, Iraq has resumed efforts to purchase large quantities of a type of uranium oxide known as yellowcake, which is an essential ingredient in this [enrichment] process. The regime was caught trying to purchase 500 metric tons of this material. It takes about 10 tons to produce enough enriched uranium for a single nuclear weapon.
Although Bush spoke the following day at the United Nations, he did not use the CIA-approved language.

The first public mention of the intelligence reporting on Iraq and Niger came on September 24, 2002, in a white paper produced by the British government. "There is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The CIA had reservations about the British dossier, but not because of its substance. Despite the fact that the British paper did not link the intelligence to Niger, officials at the CIA were concerned that the reference could compromise the source that had provided the intelligence.

That same day, September 24, staffers at the National Security Council (NSC) asked the CIA to clear additional language on Iraq and Niger. "We also have intelligence that Iraq has sought large amounts of uranium and uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, from Africa. Yellowcake is an essential ingredient in the process to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." The CIA once again approved the language, but once again the president did not use it.

The Senate Select Intelligence Committee met on October 2, 2002, and questioned senior U.S. intelligence officials in closed session about the threat from Iraq. Here, for the first time, a senior CIA official raised doubts about the reporting on Iraq and Niger. Responding to a question from Senator Jon Kyl, who asked if there was anything in the British white paper that the CIA disputed, deputy CIA director John McLaughlin said this:


The one thing where I think they stretched a little bit beyond where we would stretch is on the points about Iraq seeking uranium from various African locations. We've looked at those reports and we don't think they are very credible. It doesn't diminish our conviction that he's going for nuclear weapons, but I think they reached a little bit on that one point.
It was a strange claim, and it provides a first glimpse of the internal confusion at the CIA on the issue of Iraq and Niger. One day earlier, on October 1, 2002, the CIA had published the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMD, Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction. This classified document--the U.S. government's official position on Iraqi WMD programs--lifted almost verbatim the aggressive language used in the aforementioned DIA study, Iraq's Reemerging Nuclear Program, published just two weeks earlier: "Iraq [has been] vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake; acquiring either would shorten the time Baghdad needs to produce nuclear weapons."

The National Intelligence Estimate continued: "A foreign government service reported that as of early 2001, Niger planned to send several tons of 'pure uranium' (probably yellowcake) to Iraq. As of early 2001, Iraq and Niger reportedly were still working out arrangements for this deal, which would be for up to 500 tons of yellowcake. We do not know the status of this arrangement." The NIE included a bullet point about other intelligence on Iraq's pursuit of uranium. "Reports indicate Iraq has also sought uranium ore from Somalia and possibly the Democratic Republic of the Congo." The INR objections to the Iraq-Niger intelligence were included but, because of an editing glitch, were placed some 60 pages away from the consensus view.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration continued its public relations campaign to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein was a threat. The White House was finalizing the text of a speech the president was scheduled to deliver in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, on the eve of the congressional vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq. The speechwriters continued their regular back and forth with the CIA for clearance of potentially sensitive language. On draft six of the speech, the CIA objected to this sentence: "The [Iraqi] regime has been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from Africa--an essential ingredient in the enrichment process."

Had something changed? The National Intelligence Estimate published just three days earlier included language as aggressive as the language proposed for the Cincinnati speech. Was it a matter of classification? The NIE was classified, while the language in the speech was meant for public consumption. And the CIA had been nervous about the British white paper. Still, twice in September the CIA had cleared similar language for a presidential address.

The White House sent the next iteration of the speech to the CIA for clearance, and the language on Iraq and Africa had not been taken out. This oversight prompted a phone call from CIA Director George Tenet to Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Tenet later recalled telling Hadley that "the reporting was weak," and that the line shouldn't be used in the Cincinnati speech. Hadley removed the disputed language, and the CIA later faxed over its reasoning for insisting on the change.

Then there occurred a communications breakdown that would prove costly. For reasons still unexplained, it appears that these objections were not communicated down the chain. The two officials responsible for coordinating the translation of intelligence into public rhetoric--Alan Foley, a top CIA nonproliferation expert, and Robert Joseph, a special assistant to the president for nonproliferation and a senior director at the NSC--were kept in the dark. In the months to come, Foley and Joseph would proceed unaware that any substantive objections had been raised to the Niger intelligence.

In an ironic twist that underscores the chronic miscommunication, on the very day President Bush delivered the Cincinnati speech--making no mention of Iraq's seeking uranium in Africa--the CIA once again approved language for a White House paper claiming Iraq had "sought uranium from Africa."

Two days later, on October 9, 2002, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller, spoke of the Iraqi threat in explaining his vote to authorize the use of force. "There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. And that may happen sooner if he can obtain access to enriched uranium from foreign sources--something that is not that difficult in the current world." (Rockefeller would be one of 77 senators voting to authorize the use of force against Iraq. The vote in the House would be 296-133.)

THEN THE STORY TOOK A BIZARRE TURN. That same day, October 9, an Italian journalist walked into the U.S. embassy in Rome and delivered a set of documents purportedly showing that Iraq had indeed purchased uranium from Niger. The embassy provided the documents to the State Department and the CIA. At State, an INR analyst almost instantly suspected the documents might be forgeries. Although several different CIA divisions received copies of the documents, the agency provided no immediate evaluation of them and did not identify them as likely fabrications.

Two events in the fall of 2002 seemed to enhance the credibility of the initial reporting on an Iraq-Niger deal. First, a French diplomat told the State Department that his government had received additional, credible reporting on the transaction and had concluded that the earlier reports were true. A second report, this one from the U.S. Navy, suggested that uranium being transferred from Niger to Iraq had been discovered in a warehouse in Cotonou, Benin. Although that report indicated that the broker for the deal was willing to talk about it, he was never contacted by the CIA or military intelligence.

On December 7, 2002, Iraq submitted to the United Nations an 11,000-page document on its weapons programs, as required by U.N. Resolution 1441. The CIA prepared the U.S. response to the Iraqi declaration. Among the scores of objections was the fact that Iraq had failed to account for its attempts to acquire uranium from Africa.

In the days leading up to the president's State of the Union speech, the Iraq-uranium-Africa claim was used repeatedly by senior U.S. officials. A January 23 speech by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz noted Iraq's failure to admit its effort to procure uranium from abroad; U.N. ambassador John Negroponte referenced it in a speech at the Security Council; the State Department included it in a fact sheet published on the department website; Secretary of State Colin Powell even used a generalized version of it in a January 26, 2003, speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment to transform it into material for nuclear weapons?"

Even as some CIA officials expressed doubts about the original Iraq-Niger reporting and the INR analyst quietly voiced his concerns about a potential hoax after careful examination of the Iraq-Niger documents passed to the U.S. embassy in Rome, the CIA approved Iraq-Niger language for the White House. Although George Tenet had been given an early draft of the State of the Union address, he never read it. As Alan Foley from the CIA and Bob Joseph from the NSC vetted the language for Bush's speech, Foley raised a concern about the Iraq-Niger wording. The agency was concerned--as it had been in the past--about potentially compromising sources and methods by disclosing the Iraq-Africa intelligence. To ease the CIA's anxiety about sources and methods, Joseph passed on a suggestion from the White House communications office: Source the reporting to the British because their government had already made the argument publicly in the white paper it had issued some five months earlier. Importantly, the CIA never objected to including the Iraq-Africa language in the State of the Union on the grounds that the information was not reliable.

That's worth repeating: The CIA never objected to including the Iraq-Africa language in the State of the Union on the grounds that the information was unreliable.

At the same time the White House speechwriting staff was preparing the State of the Union for delivery January 28, 2003, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were gathering materials for the upcoming U.S. presentation on Iraq to the U.N. Security Council. The CIA would provide material for three six-inch briefing books on WMD, Iraq and Terrorism, and Iraqi Human Rights Abuses. Among the WMD materials, in a memo dated January 24, 2003, was the language from the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's "vigorous" attempts to procure uranium from Africa.

On January 28, President Bush delivered his State of the Union. Among his many claims that night was this one: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

In the meantime, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. body responsible for monitoring nuclear proliferation, began to ask the United States and Britain for more information on the claims about Iraq's seeking uranium from Africa. In early February, the U.S. government made available to the IAEA the contents of its original reporting on the issue as well as the documents delivered by the Italian journalist to the U.S. embassy in Rome.

Colin Powell's U.N. presentation did not make reference to the Iraq-Africa intelligence because, according to recollections of a State Department staffer, there had been no new developments. But the claim did not end with the State of the Union. In an op-ed that ran in the Chicago Tribune on February 16, 2003, Hadley reiterated it: "Iraq has an active procurement program. According to British intelligence, the regime has tried to acquire natural uranium from abroad."

On March 3, 2003, the IAEA shared with the U.S. government its assessment that the October 2002 documents on an Iraq-Niger deal for uranium were forgeries. The following day, the French government announced that the assessment it had previously given the United States--that an Iraq-Niger deal had taken place--was based on the same forged documents. (Some current and former Bush administration officials remain convinced that the French role in this matter was no accident. They speculate that French intelligence, seeking to embarrass the U.S. government, may have been the original source of the bad documents. An FBI investigation into the matter continues.)

As the IAEA findings made their way into the U.S. media, the White House began to understand that the forgeries would be a problem. When the war started later that month, all the focus shifted to the fighting in Iraq. It would be a temporary reprieve.

ON MAY 6, 2003, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof examined prewar U.S. claims of WMD in Iraq. His article included this curious passage:


I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.
The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted--except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.

It was the first of many times Joseph Wilson would tell his story to a reporter and the first of many times he would overstate his role and invent his supposed findings. The White House didn't pay much attention to the Kristof column. Few people knew about Wilson and his CIA-sponsored trip, and those who did know dismissed Wilson's claims as wildly inaccurate. Wilson, after all, had gone to Niger and returned some eight months before the U.S. government ever came into possession of the forged documents.

But if the White House shrugged off the story, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post did not. On June 12, 2003, Pincus published a story that "kicked everything off," according to a former White House official. Pincus wrote:


During his trip, the CIA's envoy spoke with the president of Niger and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents.
After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," the former U.S. government official said.

Two days after the Washington Post story, on June 14, Wilson spoke at a forum sponsored by the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC). Although Wilson never told the gathering he was the source for the stories about "the ambassador's" trip to Africa, his comments revealed intimate knowledge of the mission.


I just want to assure you that that American ambassador who has been cited in reports in the New York Times and in the Washington Post, and now in the Guardian over in London, who actually went over to Niger on behalf of the government--not of the CIA but of the government--and came back in February of 2002 and told the government that there was nothing to this story, later called the government after the British white paper was published and said you all need to do some fact-checking and make sure the Brits aren't using bad information in the publication of the white paper, and who called both the CIA and the State Department after the president's State of the Union and said to them you need to worry about the political manipulation of intelligence if, in fact, the president is talking about Niger when he mentions Africa.
That person was told by the State Department that, well, you know, there's four countries that export uranium. That person had served in three of those countries, so he knew a little bit about what he was talking about when he said you really need to worry about this. But I can assure you that that retired American ambassador to Africa, as Nick Kristof called him in his article, is also pissed off, and has every intention of ensuring that this story has legs. And I think it does have legs. It may not have legs over the next two or three months, but when you see American casualties moving from one to five or to ten per day, and you see Tony Blair's government fall because in the U.K. it is a big story, there will be some ramifications, I think, here in the United States. So I hope that you will do everything you can to keep the pressure on. Because it is absolutely bogus for us to have gone to war the way we did.

The website for EPIC includes a biography of Wilson under the June 14, 2003, event that concludes with this sentence: "He is married to the former Valerie Plame and has four children."

Wilson also peddled his story to John Judis and Spencer Ackerman at the New Republic. And as in the whispered "telephone" game that kids play around the campfire, the story became more distorted the more it was told. In the New Republic's version, Vice President Cheney received the forged documents directly from the British a year before Bush spoke the "16 words" in the January 2003 State of the Union. Cheney then


had given the information to the CIA, which in turn asked a prominent diplomat, who had served as ambassador to three African countries, to investigate. He returned after a visit to Niger in February 2002 and reported to the State Department and the CIA that the documents were forgeries. The CIA circulated the ambassador's report to the vice president's office, the ambassador confirms to TNR. But, after a British dossier was released in September detailing the purported uranium purchase, administration officials began citing it anyway, culminating in its inclusion in the State of the Union. "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," the former ambassador tells TNR.
It should be clear by now that the only one telling flat-out lies was Joseph Wilson. Again, Wilson's trip to Niger took place in February 2002, some eight months before the U.S. government received the phony Iraq-Niger documents in October 2002. So it is not possible, as he told the Washington Post, that he advised the CIA that "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." And it is not possible, as Wilson claimed to the New York Times, that he debunked the documents as forgeries.

That was hardly Wilson's only fabrication. He would also tell reporters that his wife had nothing to do with his trip to Niger and, as noted in the New Republic article, that Vice President Cheney's office had seen the report of his findings. Both claims were false.

It seems that very few people paid attention to the CIA's report on Wilson's trip to Niger. And those who did found that his account--particularly his revelation of the meeting between Mayaki and the Iraqis in 1999--supported the original reporting that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.

If the White House launched a campaign to counter the claims Wilson was making to columnists like Kristof, it doesn't appear to have been very comprehensive. Officials who worked on other aspects of the Iraq WMD story say they do not recall any coordinated effort to correct Wilson's misrepresentations. And, in any case, the results were hardly what you'd expect from a White House offensive. Several reporters known to have spoken with Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, the senior White House officials apparently at the center of the current investigation, have testified that they did not learn of Plame's identity or status from either person.

WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS OFFICIALS had good reason to be distracted. Behind the headlines and intensifying public scrutiny of the case for war in Iraq, a leak war had erupted. David Sanger, a veteran reporter for the New York Times, had been calling the White House as the Times prepared a comprehensive report on the administration's prewar claims about Iraqi WMD. Sasnger wanted to know why Colin Powell hadn't made the same claim about uranium from Africa in his U.N. presentation that Bush had made one week before. Sanger also inquired about whether the CIA had warned Bush against using the uranium reference.

The White House scrambled to come up with a chronology for Sanger. Although the language in the State of the Union had its roots in intelligence on Iraq and uranium from October 2001, a full year before the U.S. government had even received the forged documents, Sanger's questions ignited a debate within the administration about whether to back off the suddenly controversial "16 words."

Then, on July 6, the New York Times published Wilson's now-famous op-ed. That account differs in important ways from the story Wilson had anonymously provided the Times, the Washington Post and the New Republic. Wilson acknowledged for the first time that he had not seen any forged document. "As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors--they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government--and were probably forged." Wilson acknowledged the same thing in an appearance that morning on Meet the Press, saying, "I had not, of course, seen the documents."

Oops.

It may well have been the case that Wilson was skeptical of the original intelligence on the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal, though it's worth remembering that this is not how CIA analysts recall his debriefing. But Wilson's charge--and one of the reasons it survives today--was not merely that his analysis differed from that of other analysts or even of Bush administration policymakers. His charge was more specific and not coincidentally more damning: The reason he was courted to write an op-ed for the New York Times and to appear on Meet the Press was not that his analysis of the Niger intelligence differed from that of the CIA or of Bush administration policymakers. No, Wilson was given those platforms because he was the man with the proof. Joseph Wilson alone, in his telling, could demonstrate that the Bush administration intentionally deceived the country to go to war.

Wilson's new version of his story caused a stir, but White House reporters at the press gaggle the following day seemed more concerned with unrest in Liberia and the president's imminent departure for Africa. It wasn't until the middle of the briefing that White House spokesman Ari Fleischer got his first question about Wilson.


Q: Can you give us the White House account of Ambassador Wilson's account of what happened when he went to Niger and investigated the suggestions that Niger was passing yellowcake to Iraq? I'm sure you saw the piece yesterday in the New York Times.
Fleischer: Well, there is zero, nada, nothing new here. Ambassador Wilson, other than the fact that now people know his name, has said all this before. But the fact of the matter is in his statements about the vice president--the vice president's office did not request the mission to Niger. The vice president's office was not informed of his mission and he was not aware of Mr. Wilson's mission until recent press accounts--press reports accounted for it.

Fleischer fielded several additional questions before calling on David Sanger, the New York Times reporter who had been seeking clarification from the White House on the broader "16 words" allegation.

Sanger: I just want to take you back to your answer before, when you said you have long acknowledged that the information on yellowcake turned out to be incorrect. If I remember right, you only acknowledged the Niger part of it as being incorrect--I think what the--
Fleischer: That's correct.
Sanger: I think what the president said during his State of the Union was he--
Fleischer: When I refer to yellowcake I refer to Niger. The question was on the context of Ambassador Wilson's mission.

Sanger: So are you saying the president's broader reference to Africa, which included other countries that were named in the NIE, were those also incorrect?
Fleischer: Well, I think the president's statement in the State of the Union was much broader than the Niger question.

Sanger: Is the president's statement correct?
Fleischer: I'm referring specifically to the Niger piece when I say that.

Sanger: Do you hold that the president--when you look at the totality of the sentence that the president uttered that day on the subject, are you confident that he was correct?
Fleischer: Yes, I see nothing that goes broader that would indicate that there was no basis to the president's broader statement. But specifically on the yellowcake, the yellowcake for Niger, we've acknowledged that that information did turn out to be a forgery.

This was a mistake. The White House had not, in fact, stated that all of the Niger reporting was wrong, only that the documents delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in October 2002 had been forgeries. But Fleischer failed to make that distinction, and his answers implied that the "16 words" had been based on the forged documents and that the White House no longer stood by those 16 words. Fleischer ended the briefing after promising to provide Sanger a definitive answer.

Fleischer's briefing meant that the White House and CIA officials who had been working to hammer out official language on the "16 words" had to move quickly. The guidance distributed to the press that day said:


We now know that documents alleging a transaction between Iraq and Niger had been forged. The other reporting that suggested Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa is not detailed or specific enough for us to be certain that such attempts were in fact made.

For much of the week, leaks and counterleaks appeared on the front pages of the nation's newspapers. The CIA told reporters that the agency had long been suspicious of the underlying intelligence on the Iraq-Niger deal. The administration told reporters that the CIA continued to provide intelligence reporting on the deal up to and through the State of the Union speech. A New York Times article called it "an unusual exercise in finger-pointing" within the Bush administration.

On July 11, 2003, Tenet released a statement in which he declared, "I am responsible for the approval process in my agency." That same day, President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters traveling with the president in Africa that the CIA had approved the language in the State of the Union. "I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services," said Bush. Rice added: "The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety."

Three days later, Robert Novak wrote a column in which he named Joseph Wilson's wife, "CIA operative" Valerie Plame. Novak sourced this information to "two senior administration officials." The CIA concluded that the reference had compromised Plame's undercover status and asked the Justice Department to investigate. On December 30, 2003, Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself in the matter, and Deputy Attorney General James Comey named U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald special prosecutor. Scores of administration officials and some journalists have testified before the grand jury. It was for initially declining to testify that New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail. The conclusion of the investigation appears imminent.

Whatever Fitzgerald determines about the veracity of individuals in the administration or the press, in their statements to each other or to the grand jury, it is not possible to understand the current investigation without appreciating the history recounted here.

ON JULY 22, 2005, the New York Times published a lengthy, front-page article detailing the work of two senior Bush administration officials, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, on the Niger-uranium story. A seemingly exhaustive timeline ran alongside the piece. In 19 bullet points, the Times provided its readers in considerable detail with what it regarded as the highlights of the story. The timeline traces events from the initial request for more information on the alleged Iraqi inquiries in Africa to Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger; from the now-famous "16 words" in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union to the details of White House telephone logs; from Bush administration claims that Karl Rove was not involved in the leak to the naming of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, and on from there to the dates that White House officials testified before the grand jury.

As I say, seemingly exhaustive. But there is one curious omission: July 7, 2004. On that date, the bipartisan Senate Select Intelligence Committee released a 511-page report on the intelligence that served as the foundation for the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq. The Senate report includes a 48-page section on Wilson that demonstrates, in painstaking detail, that virtually everything Joseph Wilson said publicly about his trip, from its origins to his conclusions, was false.

This is not a minor detail. The Senate report, which served as the source for much of the chronology in this article, is the definitive study of the events leading up to the compromising of Valerie Plame. The committee staff, both Democrats and Republicans, read all of the intelligence. They saw all of the documents. They interviewed all of the characters. And every member of the committee from both parties signed the report.

It is certainly the case that the media narrative is much more sensational than the Senate report. A story about malfeasance is perhaps more interesting than a story about incompetence. A story about deliberate White House deception is perhaps more interesting than a story about bureaucratic miscommunication. A story about retaliation is perhaps more interesting than a story about clarification.

But sometimes the boring stories have an additional virtue. They're true.

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

Beware Your Wish
By ELI LAKE
http://www.nysun.com/article/21795?access=225346

The big irony to savor at the center of the Valerie Plame case is that everything everyone thinks they know about Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation has been leaked. Mr. Fitzgerald has not held a press conference explaining what criminal counts, if any, he will bring. Nor has the grand jury listening to all the secret evidence issued an indictment against any of the White House officials appearing before them. But if you were to believe the newspapers and the Web logs, you'd think that Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby are about to be hauled off in handcuffs.

This prosecution has the potential to criminalize the very kind of journalism that for the past four years has served so well the very journalists who are egging on Mr. Fitzgerald. It now appears likely that the special prosecutor will argue that Messrs. Libby and Rove mishandled classified information by discussing Ms. Plame's identity with reporters. That is the same kind of charge that, under the espionage statute, a U.S. attorney, Paul McNulty, has brought against former American Israel Public Affairs Committee aides, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. Mr. McNulty charges that the lobbyists broke the law when they passed them on to reporters and Israeli diplomats details of Iran policy developments they'd heard from a Pentagon analyst, Larry Franklin.

These developments ought to frighten the left. Where would the president's critics be without anonymous and classified disclosures from CIA analysts, diplomats, and military officers unhappy with the president's policy? Without these intelligence leaks the public would never have learned that, say, Ahmad Chalabi allegedly fooled the entire American intelligence community into believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Valerie Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, was a leaker when he, acting anonymously, shared his story of a secret trip to Niger with the New Republic. A whole literature devoted to demonizing the neoconservatives is at risk.

On one level the matter would be quite funny. Here you have a White House that values loyalty and secrecy above all else being charged with compromising the alias of one of our spies. There you have the war critics who have written their talking points from classified leaks themselves demanding maximum punishment for leakers. Joshua Micah Marshall and David Corn, call your office, if not your lawyers.

But it is turning into a tragedy. In the last five days critics of the press, bloggers, and journalists have pounced on the one person, Judith Miller, who held out the longest to defend the right of the press to keep its sources confidential. Everyone now seems to have an opinion about whether Ms. Miller should have been assigned to any story at all regarding Iraq, dredging up the silly claim that she committed journalistic crimes when she wrote about weapons of mass destruction, as if she were the only person in the press or government who believed Saddam Hussein was compiling such an arsenal.

The editor of the trade publication, Editor & Publisher, Greg Mitchell, called for the New York Times to fire Ms. Miller, complaining that he found it hard to believe Ms. Miller could not remember who told her the name "Valerie Flame," as she wrote in her notebook. Let's get this straight. The editor of a publication devoted to covering newspapers is angry that a reporter didn't disclose enough of her confidential sources to a grand jury in a criminal prosecution.

Mr. Wilson and his defenders claim that the outing of his wife's true identity to Robert Novak was part of a plan to smear him, that the leak caused great harm to national security. Mr. Wilson claims that Karl Rove told reporters in the summer of 2003, "Wilson's wife is fair game." In this respect, Mr. Wilson's defenders argue that the White House leak is different than the ones they gobble up to smear the neocons.

It turns out, however, that Mr. Wilson also said that Mr. Cheney authorized his trip to Niger and therefore the vice president knew that it was false to claim Iraq had sought uranium from Africa. Based on the accounts of reporters Ms. Miller and Matthew Cooper, it appears that if there was a mention of Mr. Wilson's wife by Messrs. Rove or Libby, it was an effort not to burn an official at the Central Intelligence Agency but to correct Mr. Wilson's own misstatement about Mr. Cheney's knowledge of his secret mission.

This version of events is supported by Mr. Novak himself. In October 2003, the columnist wrote that the CIA confirmed that Ms. Plame worked for the agency, but asked him not to write her name because it could cause her difficulties were she ever assigned to a foreign country, which the columnist said his CIA source said was doubtful. And if Ms. Plame's true identity was such a secret, then why did Mr. Wilson learn it, according to his book, on his second date with her? We'll have to wait for Mr. Fitzgerald to actually release his report to get a definitive answer on this. But for the time being, it's a time for those praying for indictments to take care about what they wish for, because they just might get it.

Fitzgerald's Moment
He doesn't have to indict anyone.
by William Kristol
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/239rebkj.asp

AS I WRITE, ON Friday afternoon October 21, no one outside special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's office--and perhaps not even Fitzgerald himself--knows what, if any, charges he'll ultimately bring in the Valerie Plame leak inquiry. Public understanding of the events in question--the disclosure of Plame's identity as a CIA operative, and any possible perjury or obstruction of justice that might have ensued--remains radically incomplete.

So let us stipulate this: If someone knowingly made public the identity of a covert CIA operative and compromised her status, whether to maliciously damage her career, to punish her husband, or to deter criticism of the White House--if, in other words, someone violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982--that person deserves to be fired and prosecuted. If individuals purposefully lied to a grand jury or engaged in a knowing conspiracy to cover up the truth, those persons deserve to be fired and prosecuted. Fitzgerald's investigation may well have uncovered crimes like these.

But it may not have, too. Press reports suggest that Fitzgerald is unlikely to bring charges under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, the original act whose possible violation he was charged with investigating. Based on what we know, and absent startling revelations, it would seem to be a huge prosecutorial overreach to bring charges under the 1917 Espionage Act. So we are presumably left with possible instances of perjury, obstruction of justice, and false statements to the FBI or the grand jury.

And here is the point: Unless the perjury is clear-cut or the obstruction of justice willful and determined, we hope that the special prosecutor has the courage to end the inquiry without bringing indictments. It is fundamentally inappropriate to allow the criminal law to be used to resolve what is basically a policy and political dispute within the administration, or between the administration and its critics. One trusts that the special counsel will have the courage after conducting his exhaustive investigation to reject inappropriate criminal indictments if the evidence does not require them, no matter how much criticism he might then get from the liberal establishment that yearns to damage the Bush administration through the use of the criminal law.

And I will go out on a limb to say this, based on the very limited information one can glean from press accounts: It seems to me quite possible--dare I say probable?--that no indictments would be the just and appropriate resolution to this inquiry.

I say this knowing that administration officials may have engaged in behavior that is not altogether admirable. I say this knowing that legions of Clinton defenders will complain that conservatives were happy to support the impeachment of a president for lying under oath seven years ago. My response to the second charge is that if anyone lied under oath the way Bill Clinton did--knowingly and purposefully in order to thwart a legitimate legal process, or if anyone engaged in an obstruction of justice, the way Bill Clinton did, then indictments would be proper. What is more, the Clinton White House mounted an extraordinary--and successful--political campaign against the office of the independent counsel and the person of Kenneth Starr. All the evidence suggests that the Bush White House has been fully cooperative with, even deferential to, the Fitzgerald investigation. And as for the first point, many people in government and politics engage in behavior that is less than admirable. That said, defending one's bosses against criticism, and debunking their attackers, is not a criminal conspiracy. Spin is not perjury. Political hardball is not a felony.

The New York Times reported on Friday that sources say Fitzgerald "will not make up his mind about any charges" until sometime this week, the final week of grand jury proceedings. We trust that Fitzgerald, who has an impressive record as a prosecutor, will call it as he sees it. A large part of any prosecutor's duty--especially that of a special counsel--is to have the courage and judgment to refrain from bringing charges when such charges would be inappropriate. With all of Washington abuzz this weekend over possible indictments of major Bush administration figures, but with the apparent grounds for those indictments seeming so shaky, we wonder if Fitzgerald might wind up surprising us all, including many at the White House: Maybe he will simply end his inquiry, having concluded that--whatever else may be said about the actions and motives of different figures in this long, unpleasant, and tortuous saga--no crimes were committed and no criminal indictments should be brought.

New Scandal, Old Mistakes
By LANNY J. DAVIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/29/opinion/29davis.html

Washington

FOR those of us who lived through the Clinton White House, it's déjà vu all over again.

The indictment against Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, by the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald presents a challenge in political-crisis management not just for the White House, but for the Democrats as well. And based on recent evidence, both are falling into the same old mistakes.

First, each side seems unable to resist applying a double standard, doing and saying exactly what only recently it criticized the other side for doing and saying.

Even before yesterday's indictments, Howard Dean and the Democratic National Committee were accusing the Republicans of being responsible for a "culture of corruption." But I remember the outrage within the Democratic Party when Republicans rushed to the microphones to accuse the Clintons of "corruption" over Whitewater, the F.B.I. files, the travel office, campaign finance and so on - all issues that turned out to be rabbit holes without any findings of guilt, much less indictments. In the end, using an isolated scandal to tie up an entire administration only hurts the nation (and tends to come back to haunt the scandal-mongering party).

Equally remarkable, some Republicans are now suggesting that perjury is not such a big deal. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas said last weekend that perjury before a grand jury is only a "technicality," comparing Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation to that of Martha Stewart, "where they couldn't find a crime and they indict on something that she said about something that wasn't a crime." (To their credit, the editorialists at The Wall Street Journal had the intellectual honesty this week of admitting that perjury is perjury.)

Second, both sides seem too quick to attack the motives of their adversaries rather than dealing with the facts. Already we hear Republican leaders suggesting that Mr. Fitzgerald has "lost his way" or is "criminalizing" ordinary politics. I often wonder whether those of us in the Clinton White House who attacked the motives of Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater special prosecutor, and tried to demonize him personally would have been better off if we had focused solely on his professional misjudgments and his disproportionate expenditure of time, effort and money.

Similarly, the Democrats are playing up the idea that White House officials may have endangered national security in playing hardball politics. Well, I can remember all the times I picked up the phone and talked "on background" to reporters, "pushing back" against rumors damaging to President Clinton and citing information that I thought was "out there." I don't remember ever worrying about whether the facts that I felt were public knowledge might have been classified. But even if I had, I would probably have rationalized that anything I had heard on the grapevine couldn't possibly be a state secret. If every political aide was prosecuted for those kinds of conversations with the press corps, I'm afraid there wouldn't be enough jails to hold us.

Third, both sides seem to believe that deny-deny-deny is the only option - rather than dealing with the facts as they are, accepting responsibility as quickly as possible, and moving on. Certainly, in retrospect, most of us who remain great believers in the Clinton presidency wish that the Monica Lewinsky matter could have been concluded much earlier, so that the last two years of the administration could have been more productive and fulfilling for President Clinton and the country.

Now President Bush must do something that for him, it seems, is the most difficult task: admit a mistake. First, he must send his press secretary, Scott McClellan, into the White House press room to apologize for his misleading the American people - probably based on incomplete or inaccurate information he was given - when he denied involvement by White House officials in the disclosure that Valerie Wilson was a C.I.A. officer.

More important, President Bush should follow the ultimate rule of White House damage control: the buck stops here. He should admit that this entire mess could have been avoided had the White House, including the vice president, criticized Ambassador Joseph Wilson openly and directly, rather than whispering "on background" into the ears of certain reporters that his wife was responsible for sending him to investigate possible Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Niger.

And then, after reminding everyone that Mr. Libby is entitled to the presumption of innocence, Mr. Bush should focus on the people's business and the far more serious problems facing America.

The best result of this latest scandal, and the hypocrisy and finger-pointing exhibited on both sides, would be for voters to say, "A pox on both your houses," reject the scandal culture and gotcha politics of both parties and seek new politics of common cause, collegiality and the public interest. The alternative is that most people will conclude that in American politics today the only standard is the double standard, and the cycles of conflict and rancor will continue.

Lanny J. Davis, a special counsel to President Bill Clinton from 1996 to 1998, is the author of "Truth to Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself: Notes From My White House Education."

What Goes Around, Comes Around
The Plame kerfuffle has made hypocrites of just about everyone.
BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007479

The Republicans who drafted and proposed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in the early days of the Reagan administration, in a vain attempt to end the career of CIA defector Philip Agee, could not have known that their hasty legislation would one day paralyze the workings of a conservative wartime administration. Nor could the eager internationalist Wilsonians who rammed through the 1917 Espionage Act--the most repressive legislation since the Alien and Sedition laws--have expected it to be used against government officials making the case for an overseas military intervention.

But then, who would have thought that liberals and civil libertarians--the New York Times called for the repeal of the IIPA as soon as it was passed, or else for it to be struck down by the courts--would find these same catch-all statutes coming in handy for the embarrassment of Team Bush? The outrage of the left at any infringement of CIA prerogatives is only the least of the ironies in the indictment of Lewis Libby for discussing matters the disclosure of which, in and of itself, appears to have violated no known law.

To judge by his verbose and self-regarding performance, containing as it did the most prolix and least relevant baseball analogy ever offered to a non-Chicago audience, Patrick Fitzgerald is not a man with whom the ironic weighs heavily. Nor does he seem discountenanced by his failure to find any breach in the IIPA or even the more broadly drawn Espionage Act. Mr. Libby stands accused of misstating his conversations with almost every journalist in Washington except for the only one--Robert Novak--who actually published the totemic name of Valerie Plame. "We have not made any allegation that Mr. Libby knowingly and intentionally outed a covert agent," Mr. Fitzgerald contentedly confirmed.

If--and one has to say "if"--the transmission of any classified information is a crime, then as Mr. Fitzgerald also confirmed, one would be in the deep waters of the Espionage Act, which is "a very difficult statute to interpret." Actually, it is a very easy act to interpret. It declares that even something very well-known is secret if the state defines it as secret: the same principle as the dreaded British Official Secrets Act. As to the critical question of whether Ms. Plame had any cover to blow, Mr. Fitzgerald was equally insouciant: "I am not speaking to whether or not Valerie Wilson was covert."

In the absence of any such assertion or allegation, one must be forgiven for wondering what any of this gigantic fuss can possibly be about. I know some apparently sensible people who are prepared to believe, still, that a Machiavellian cabal in the White House wanted to punish Joseph Wilson by exposing his wife to embarrassment and even to danger. So strong is this belief that it envisages Karl Rove (say) deciding to accomplish the foul deed by tipping off Robert Novak, one of the most anti-Iraq-war and pro-CIA journalists in the capital, as if he were precisely the pliant tool one would select for the dastardly work. And then, presumably to thicken the plot, Mr. Novak calls the CIA to confirm, as it readily did, that Ms. Plame was in the agency's employ.

Meanwhile, and just to make things more amusing, George Tenet, in his capacity as Director of Central Intelligence, tells Dick Cheney that he employs Mr. Wilson's wife as an analyst of the weird and wonderful world of WMD. So jealously guarded is its own exclusive right to "out" her, however, that no sooner does anyone else mention her name than the CIA refers the Wilson/Plame disclosure to the Department of Justice.

Mr. Fitzgerald, therefore, seems to have decided to act "as if." He conducts himself as if Ms. Plame's identity was not widely known, as if she were working under "non official cover" (NOC), as if national security had been compromised, and as if one or even two catch-all laws had been broken. By this merely hypothetical standard, he has performed exceedingly well, even if rather long-windedly, before pulling up his essentially empty net.

However, what if one proposes an alternative "what if" narrative? What if Mr. Wilson spoke falsely when he asserted that his wife, who was not in fact under "non-official cover," had nothing to do with his visit to Niger? What if he was wrong in stating that Iraqi envoys had never even expressed an interest in Niger's only export? (Most European intelligence services stand by their story that there was indeed such a Baathist initiative.) What if his main friends in Niger were the very people he was supposed to be investigating?

Well, in that event, and after he had awarded himself some space on an op-ed page, what was to inhibit an employee of the Bush administration from calling attention to these facts, and letting reporters decide for themselves? The CIA had proven itself untrustworthy or incompetent on numerous occasions before, during and after the crisis of Sept. 11, 2001. Why should it be the only agency of the government that can invoke the law, broken or (as in this case) unbroken, to protect itself from leaks while protecting its own leakers?

All worthwhile information in Washington is "classified" one way or another. We have good reason to be grateful to various officials and reporters who have, in our past, decided that disclosure was in the public interest. None of the major criticisms of the Bush administration would have become available if it were not for the willingness of many former or serving bureaucrats to "go public." But this widely understood right--now presumably in some jeopardy--makes no sense if supporters of the administration are not permitted to reply in kind.

Logic and history suggest that there will be a turn of the political wheel, and that Dems will regain control of the White House or the Congress. Will they be willing to accept the inflexible standard of secrecy that they have exacted in the Wilson imbroglio? Will they forbid their own civil servants to put a case, in confidence, to members of the press? Will they allow their trusted loyalists to be dragged before grand juries, and the reporters to be forced to open notebooks to the gaze of any prosecutor? The answer today is presumably "yes," which brings me back to where I began, and to the stupid acquiescence of Republicans in the passage of a law that should never have allowed to hollow out the First Amendment in the first place.

Mr. Hitchens, columnist for Vanity Fair, is the author of "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America" (Eminent Lives, 2005).

This is no way to bring down Bush and Blunkett
The scandal-mongering that passes for politics on both sides of the Atlantic means no one is ever truly held to account.
by Brendan O'Neill
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAE19.htm

So on both sides of the Atlantic, scandal is once again the big issue.


In America, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, chief of staff to vice-president Dick Cheney, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for giving inconsistent evidence about the leaking of a CIA agent's name - Valerie Plame - to the press. (Don't worry if you feel left out of the loop: as Mark Steyn said in the Spectator, it's a 'squabble among people you've probably never heard of'.) And in Britain, David Blunkett, former home secretary turned work and pensions secretary, is under pressure over revelations that he took up a post as director of a DNA testing company without first consulting the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments - even though he was only in the job for two weeks and resigned from it when Tony Blair put him back in the Cabinet in May. That might be described as a squabble over issues you probably don't care about.


As far as scandals go, these are hardly up there with the Profumo Affair, when in 1963 it was revealed that the British secretary of state for war, John Profumo, was knocking about with a high-class call girl, Christine Keeler, who was also sleeping with a Soviet official based in London - much less something like Watergate, in which President Richard Nixon was implicated in the theft of documents from the Democrats, for which he was eventually impeached and resigned for in 1974. The Plame and Blunkett scandals are even less interesting than the Clinton/Lewinsky affair in the Nineties, which at least had the merit of being mildly raunchy.


But today's scandals are more than history repeated as farce (or farce repeated as double-farce, to be more accurate): the elevation of the pallid Plame affair and Blunkett's behaviour to front-page prominence in America and Britain confirms the ascendancy of scandal-mongering in Western politics and how all sides now use rumour and revelation to circumvent public debate and knock down their opponents. The real scandal is not anything that Scooter Woshisname or David Blunkett did, but today's substitution of intrigue for democracy. Scandal has itself become a mode of politics.


So if these people haven't really done anything very outrageous, what's with the shock-horror headlines? Both of these affairs are really attempts by opposition parties to rattle the ruling party with scandal where they have failed to do so with politics. This is most clear in the American spats: if you can bring yourself to read the coverage you'll realise that the Plame debacle is kind of, in a roundabout way, about Iraq - and that, ironically, it has its origins in bickering among the US elite itself rather than in the efforts of the anti-war movement. There's this guy called Joseph Wilson, a former US ambassador, who in February 2002 was sent to Niger to investigate intelligence that Iraq had tried to buy compressed uranium there (intelligence that was cited by both Bush and Blair in the run-up to war). Wilson found no evidence, and after the war he penned a piece that said 'we went to war under false pretences' (1). Seemingly in revenge, 'two senior administration officials' leaked to journalists - including Judith Miller at the New York Times - the fact that Wilson's wife is Valerie Plame, a CIA agent with expertise in nuclear matters. And because it is a federal offence to disclose a CIA agent's name, there is an ongoing grand jury trial into who leaked it, why they did it, and….are you still awake?


Democrats and their army of supporters in the liberal media and Blogosphere have attached themselves to this internal wrangling in a last-ditch effort to punish the Bushies over the Iraq war. What a moral and political cop-out: having failed to stop the war before it started, or to make a convincing political argument against it that might have won the masses to their side, anti-war activists and Democrat politicians (many of whom supported the war) now hope to embarrass Bush officials over their wartime squabbles rather than hold them to account for invading a sovereign state and leaving it in a mess. Various anti-Bush websites cheer on Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor overseeing the investigation into the Plame leak, with headlines such as 'Happy Fitzmas!' (2). Democrats also hope Fitzgerald will do their dirty work for them; they seem to be relying on him to give Bush a bloody nose over Iraq because, in the words of one columnist, they are 'either unable or unwilling to present a clear agenda of how they would do things differently' (3). Scandal-mongering moves into the gap where political debate ought to be.


Similarly in the UK, the Tories are stoking the Blunkett 'scandal' as a way of having a pop at New Labour - a government they have failed miserably to oust from office over the past eight years. They may be in the midst of a leadership election, but serious and senior Tories seem to be devoting their energies to bringing down Blunkett over the fact that he had some job for a couple of weeks. Sir Malcolm Rifkind told the BBC that Blunkett 'has lost the plot', and he and other Tory dignitaries have written a letter to Blair demanding to know what action he plans to take (4). And they're calling for an independent inquiry. (The Blunkett affair also shows that, once you have been tarred with the scandal brush, there's no escaping it. Like Peter Mandelson before him, Blunkett has for the past year been chased from pillar to post over matters relating to his personal life.)


The shift from clashes over political beliefs and actions to spats over individual discretions and bad behaviour has been gathering steam for the past 30 years. As Matthew A Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg argue in their very good book Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined its Citizens and Privatised Public Debate, since Watergate both Democrats and Republicans have relied on scandal-mongering to shift the balance of power in DC. They write: 'Today's tactics of political combat - revelation, investigation and prosecution - have moved to the centre stage once occupied by electoral mobilisation…. Both parties [have] developed and demonstrated the capacity to drive their opponents from office without mobilising or even consulting the electorate, which [seem] a mere vestigal organ of the American body politic.' As the authors point out, this makes the public into 'virtual citizens', who can 'watch political struggles in which we are not invited to participate' (5).


Indeed, neither the Republicans in America nor New Labour in Britain are in a good position to complain about the scandal-mongering currently being wielded against them: these two parties came to power through that very process. The Republicans made numerous charges against the Clinton administration in the Nineties, including over Whitewater real estate development in Arkansas, various sexual affairs, and most notably Clinton's fling with Lewinsky, over which he was impeached for lying under oath before the grand jury. Blair swept to power in 1997 on a ticket of attacking the Tories for being wily and corrupt, and promising that his government would be 'whiter than white' and he 'a pretty straight kind of guy'. Both parties made a rod for their own backs with their promises to be better behaved than their forebears. Indeed, it is only as a result of New Labour's own broadened definition of scandal that something like Blunkett's job could be judged as earth-quaking, parliament-shaking headline news. The more the politics of sleaze takes hold, the more everything and anything can be defined as 'sleazy'.


The rise of scandal mirrors the decline of democracy and debate. It's not that politicians are greedier or more unfaithful to their spouses or more closely linked to business interests than they were in the past - rather, as politics has been emptied of vision and ideology, and become more and more remote from the concerns of the electorate, so accusations of scandal have become the currency of contemporary debate. Crenson and Ginsberg argue that 'there is little reason to believe that the actual incidence of official corruption or abuse of power has increased since the 1970s. Instead, the growing use of criminal sanctions against public officials has been closely linked to struggle for political power in the United States.' (6) Today's parliamentary politics, in short, more closely resembles the courts of the ancien regimes than mass democracy, with gossip, intrigue and backstabbing taking the place of open debate before a mass audience of voters.


No one benefits from this scandal-mongering. As everyone chases the head of some politician or official judged to have done something dodgy, real political issues do not get thrashed out or properly resolved. So Bush and his cronies are challenged over whispers and leaks about Iraq rather than over their invasion of Iraq (or Afghanistan, come to think of it). Blunkett is blasted for his personal behaviour rather than for all those scandalously illiberal things he did as home secretary - from bringing in ASBOs to denouncing anybody who defended free speech or civil liberties as a woolly 'Hampstead liberal'. That means that even if Blunkett and some Bush officials are brought down, they will not have been defeated politically. Thus their political legacies - foreign interventionism on the part of Bush, and clamping down on freedom in the name of security on the part of Blunkett - are likely to remain. As with the old court politics, the ruling orthodoxies stay in place and only the faces change.


And in the process, politics becomes more and more of a spectator sport - and the rest of us become increasingly cynical about these apparent liars, fornicators and incompetents who rule over us.

Notes

(1) Indictment rocks Bush administration, BBC News, 28 October 2005

(2) See, for example: And a very merry Fitzmas to you, Democratic Underground, 9 October 2005

(3) Bush is in ethical meltdown but all the liberals can do is gloat, Gary Younge, Guardian, 31 October 2005

(4) I am not resigning says Blunkett, BBC News, 1 November 2005

(5) Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatised Its Public, Matthew A Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002

(6) Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatised Its Public, Matthew A Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002