Code Rove

By Evan Derkacz, AlterNet. Posted July 13, 2005.

Okay, keep your eye on the ball: Karl Rove endangered America.

But, you've been keeping up, reading, watching TV, and you've undoubtedly heard (or will hear) that Karl Rove didn't say the words "Valerie Plame," or he didn't mean to blow her cover -- or was her cover too threadbare to even matter? -- or Joe Wilson's claims weren't true, or else he was trying to save a reporter from printing a false story, or ...

… Hey, look over there: MoveOn.org is unpatriotic!

Confused? Well, that's the plan, anyway. By shattering the story into a dozen shards, defenders of Rove's dangerous abuse of power hope to shift the debate away from the scandalous fact that Karl Rove endangered America by leaking the classified information that Joseph Wilson's wife "works at the agency" (CIA). In fact, the GOP's latest talking points on the Rove scandal focus almost exclusively on smearing Joseph Wilson -- which is ironic, to say the least, given the fact that this whole scandal began with a smear of Joseph Wilson.

Ignore it. Joseph Wilson didn't order Karl Rove to leak the identity of his wife.

Next, lawyers and "experts" will parse the legalese: Here are the A, B and C required to convict Karl Rove of violating the law, they'll say. Again, ignore it. It's not about the letter of the law, it's about two simple facts:

1. Karl Rove endangered America
2. Karl Rove retains his security clearance and the trust of President Bush, thus enabling him to do it again.

All the remaining questions being filtered to the media for scripted debate on Hannity and Colmes or Hardball are, to varying degrees, worth debating. Sometime. And in a balanced venue. But right now, the most important strands in this scandal are the two simple, irrefutable facts above.

A 'Treasonous' Action

This is not a partisan issue. Back in October of 2003, shortly after Robert Novak -- over CIA protests -- published Plame's identity, a group of former CIA agents testified before a Senate Democratic Policy Committee on the outing of their colleague. The agents, Larry Johnson, Michael Grimaldi and Brent Cavan, all of whom are Republicans, pulled no punches in their shared statement:

We also want to send a clear message to the political “operatives” responsible for “outing” Mrs. Wilson. Such action was treacherous, if not treasonous. ... Such action has allowed the less attractive aspects of politics to supersede the Government's responsibility to protect the citizens of this nation and the individuals who serve in difficult, dangerous covert capacities. This has set a sickening precedent. The “senior Administration officials” who did this have warned all U.S. intelligence officers and the intelligence community that any one individual may be compromised if providing information or factual analysis the White House does not like.

We now know that the "senior Administration official" referred to in the above testimony is Karl Rove. We know it because his email to Time magazine's Matt Cooper says so (Correction: Rove and Cooper spoke on the phone. Cooper subsequently emailed his editor revealing the contents of their conversation -- ed.) and because Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, all but cemented this fact when he "updated" his public statements from: "[Rove] did not reveal any confidential information," to the more litigation-proof: "[Karl Rove] never knowingly disclosed classified information."

There's a certain irony at work when the president's most trusted adviser, Karl Rove, outs Valerie Plame, a WMD specialist, while waging a war on Iraq which was, publicly at least, about protecting America from WMD.

Outing her not only jeopardized whatever she was working on at the time but, as the Washington Post reported, "Every foreign intelligence service would run Plame's name through its databases within hours of its publication to determine if she had visited their country and to reconstruct her activities."

The article also warned that, "Intelligence officials have said that once Plame's job as an undercover operative was revealed, other agency secrets could be unraveled and her sources might be compromised or endangered."

But let's return to the testimony of the former CIA agents for the specifics:

If left unpunished, this cowardly act [blowing Plame's cover] will not only hinder our efforts to recruit qualified individuals into the clandestine service, but it will have a far-reaching, deleterious effect on our ability to recruit foreign intelligence assets overseas. Who in their right mind would ever agree to become a spy for the United States when we cannot even protect our own undercover officers?

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.

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