Truth and consequences: Karl Rove is just the tip of the iceberg

[meegbear]

Political leaders have a challenging relationship with the truth. History has yet to record a national leader who speaks the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Citizens in democracies seem to accept that complete candor is incompatible with public life, that what might be unacceptable in a personal relationship is at least occasionally tolerable in political battle. A lie — or even lies — may not be nice, but they can be defensible under some circumstances.

So where do leaders who engage in deception draw the line? Is it possible to engage in one lie too many? These days, those questions must be paramount for President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney as they ponder the fates of their respective political alter egos, Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Yearlong suspicions that Rove and Libby were involved in the leak to right-wing columnist Robert Novak that illegally unmasked Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative have been confirmed. The special prosecutor investigating the leak must now determine whether Rove and Libby were not just principal actors in the drama, but guilty of crimes.

Compromising Plame’s career was not an end in itself. It was merely a means to attack the credibility of then-ambassador Joseph Wilson, who disputed the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein was buying African uranium to construct nuclear weapons with which to attack the United States, and who argued that such claims were based on forged documents. Since Wilson is married to Plame and Plame recommended him for the job of looking into the African-uranium charge (a job, by the way, that someone else gave him), then husband plus wife must equal treason. That, in any case, was the unspoken justification for the leak.

<snip>

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/editorial/documents/04838550.asp

[wishlist]

1. June 10 2003 memo shows State Dept was sure of no Iraq/Niger link

Rove's defense involves claim that he was not retaliating against Wilson but merely steering journalists away from 'a bad story' which I guess means he did not want them writing stories that could serve to bolster Wilson's credibility and his claims of WH dishonesty on WMD.

"Since Wilson is married to Plame and Plame recommended him for the job of looking into the African-uranium charge (a job, by the way, that someone else gave him), then husband plus wife must equal treason. That, in any case, was the unspoken justification for the leak."

This justificatiion for the leak makes no sense and contradicts with the memo that acknowledges Wilson was right.

[WinkyDink]

2. My letter in response

Agent Plame's entire raison d'etre, as was her CIA-cover "company" in Iraq, was to monitor any movements on the WMD front.
Because she and her fellow operatives KNEW there were no WMD's in Iraq, their information could have put the kibosh on the entire invasion.
Thus, Plame and company were most decidedly planned targets for ruination by the Bush Administration.
Undoubtedly, agents still in the field were both compromised and subsequently executed, because of the revelation of both her and her company's identities.

In sum, the Wilsons were a targeted two-fer, because they could unmask the deliberate lies about WMD's and "uranium from Niger" testified to by Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Bush, and Blair in order to commit the war crime of unprovoked aggression against a sovereign state.
Since their motives were not as claimed, being fictional in basis, their motives must be deemed ulterior.

In other words, the Bush Administration clearly harbors not only perjurers and obstructors of justice, but also, by the definitions in U.S. and International laws, traitors and war criminals.

I'd say those are grounds for impeachment, conviction, and imprisonment.
At the least.