Was Plame Outed by a Foreign Spy? (Justin Raimondo)

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Was Plame Outed by a Foreign Spy? (Justin Raimondo)

October 21, 2005
Was Plame Outed
by a Foreign Spy?
The Larry Franklin-Plame connection
by Justin Raimondo

For a good many years, I have been writing about the tremendous influence of the neoconservatives in formulating and implementing U.S. foreign policy, and maintaining that their role has not just been important – it has been decisive. For underscoring the neocons' pivotal role – since before the Kosovo war – I have been called a lot of uncomplimentary names, the least of which is "conspiracy theorist," and for a while there Antiwar.com's insistence on emphasizing this theme tended to isolate us from antiwar leftists, as well as alienating the more "mainstream" types who doubted whether such an abstruse ideological movement could possibly wield the sort of clout I was describing.

No more. Now the lefties over at, say, DailyKos.com, are hip to the magnitude of the threat and are busy poring over old PNAC position papers <.pdf> looking for clues to our present predicament. Even the word neocon, once all but unrecognizable to the great majority of readers, is now firmly embedded in the American political lexicon – even as the consequences of their policies exact an ever increasing toll. Yet still there are some doubters: how could such a small group of people exercise such power – especially considering that they aren't exactly a mass movement. Someone once quipped that there are only about 20 or so neocons – but 18 of them are major newspaper columnists. Yet there is more to it than that, and now that Scooter-gate is unfolding before the astonished eyes of official Washington, the neocons' ubiquity in the mid-to-upper levels of the U.S. government's national security and foreign policy bureaucracy is all too obvious. General Anthony Zinni was one of the first to call attention to the dangers inherent in the neocons' foreign policy specialization, and now we have another major senior figure in the Washington policy establishment coming forward to confirm, in no uncertain terms, the nature and extent of the problem.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson was Colin Powell's chief of staff over at the State Department, where he formerly served as associate director of policy planning. Before that, he was the director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College. At a recent talk given at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., Col. Wilkerson described the dysfunctional mess the national security bureaucracy finds itself in these days, due in large part to the sheer complexity of the problems we face. He emphasized the need for dissent, because the would-be central planners can't possibly know all there is to know about even a single issue – say, nuclear proliferation – and must depend on others who have no compunctions about speaking freely, without fear of violating some party line. Yet that, he sadly avers, is not the case today:

"And when I say that is not the case today, I stop on 26 January 2005. I don't know what the case is today; I wish I did. But the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out."

snip>http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7717