Pat Buchanan: Wilson's column struck the king, the king's men have rights

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

October 20, 2005 | 11:52 a.m. ET

My take on Plamegate (Pat Buchanan)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5445086/

During Watergate, a good friend went to prison for saying twice before a grand jury, "I can't recall." That was about a picayune matter compared to Judy Miller's "I can't recall" to the question, "Who gave you this name, 'Valerie Flame'?" So, my guess is that there are multiple indictments coming, for lying to investigators, perjury, obstruction of justice, and disclosure of national security secrets for political purposes. And maybe conspiracy. As for the original charge of deliberately and knowingly outing a CIA covert operative, I still can't see it. Novak's second column seems to exonerate totally both his sources of any such charge.

As for the charge that the White House Iraq Group was out to "get" Joe Wilson, this does not seem to stand up either, unless the WHIG did something criminal to discredit him. Wilson's column struck the king and the king's men have as much right to challenge his veracity and motives, and even impeach his character as does a defense attorney dealing with a hostile prosecution witness trying to help convict his client.

My view remains: The White House leakers, in naming Plame, were not trying so much to "out" her, as to shift blame for have sent Wilson to Niger away from the White House and Veep over on to the CIA where, quite frankly, it belonged. They were not trying to kill Valerie's career, but simply saying, "We weren't the dumbos who sent Joe, the CIA did it."

My guess is, however, this thing has metastasized from the original charge and Libby or his lawyer may have problems in that they appear to have tried to signal Miller to invoke reporters' privilege, or not to testify, which seems to be not only interference with the investigation but an encouragement to Miller to commit contempt of court rather than help out the Bulldog. Scooter's lawyer has been scrambling like a runner caught fifteen yards behind the line of scrimmage on fourth down.

[napi21]

1. Pat's right on this one. Bet he'd also admit that it's rarely the crime

that takes down "The King", but the coverup!

[venable]

3. no, he's not right

he is trying to tell us tht the WH simply didn't want to be blamed for 'sending' him to Niger.

The WH has no problem with who would have sent him. The WH has a problem with his report.

It's either stupid or it's obfuscating for Buchanan to write this.

They were not trying to shift blame as to who sent him. They were trying to discredit him, including saying that his ambitious wife wanted him in the thick of things. Their point is that Wilson is one half of a secret plan to discredit Bush. Absurd.

[Cappadonna]

2. What kind of ass backwards ideas would you expect from a Nixon Hack.......

This doesn't surprise me. Buchannan is right on the war but that still doesn't negate this ass-clown from being one of the most evil republican neo-nazi crazymen and outright waterboy for the Right Wing in America.

That outing a CIA agent isn't really a crime (its actually an act of treason) and that the White House has the right to discredit a critic by jeopardizing national security-- not to mention the life of a trusted diplomat's wife? Also how could he not see outing Plame as a direct attack on Joe Wilson after he admitted that Joe Wilson's op-ed made the Bush crime family look like heartless thugs making up this war as they go along? You just happen to slip up and mention a spy's name to reporters who husband just happens to be one of the most established critics of the White House's War of Agression from the center-right? Sounds like Pat's been communing with Tricky Dick's ghost again.

[emulatorloo]

4. OTOH read this part - Buchanan speculates is much bigger. . . .

<snip>

My own sense, from hearing and reading about Fitzgerald is that he may be going after much larger game, that he may have what Bob Bennett calls a "big case," that he may be going after the White House and WHIG for fabricating the case for war, that he is roaming afield, looking into who forged the Niger documents and passed them on to U.S. intelligence and whether the case for war was shot through with deceit and lies. (But if lying us into war is a crime, we would have to have a second look at that FDR memorial on the trail to Haynes Point.)

An interesting question is whether Fitzgerald is now working with McNulty, who got Larry Franklin to plead and is now going after AIPAC and the Israelis and has the fruits of five years of FBI investigations going back into the 1990s. Are the two Irish prosecutors collaborating?

<snip>

[venable]

21. WHIG is target, I hope

I'm not a lawyer, but WHIG sounds like a conspiracy...well, of course it IS a conspiracy. Does their intentional misleading rise to the level of criminal activity, that's what I don't know.

I mean activity that can be criminally prosecuted.

The entire WHIG membership, down (or up) to Mary Matalin, should be held accountable for the activity of the group.

[Kagemusha]

5. Is outing Plame for political blame-shifting not bad enough?

To hell with intent. Look at the results: a large CIA operation was compromised because of this. There are laws on the books saying to not do this. The results are the direct consequences of having treated the law like an inconvenient set of official rules that real officials operating in the real world need not obey, nor take particularly seriously. In other words, blame shifting on yellowcake was so important that risking serious prison terms and banking on the power of the presidential pardon was actually worth it to these people, and their only regret is being caught by a prosecutor more dogged and competent than they thought would be the case.

Is this not bad enough? Is this really so little a problem that the nation *shouldn't* send people to jail for violating all these laws dutifully passed by Congress and signed by the President of the day to protect national security and prevent national security from being a political football, which was (and is) certain to compromise that security?

Otherwise, it's a fight between the Executive branch's right to breach national security for partisan political purposes and the Congress' statutes that say it has no such right.

I'm trying to decide which side of this Pat is on.

[jobycom]

13. Well said. nt

[CTyankee]

23. You are right! I cannot for the life of me

understand how the repukes can defend this kind of thing, or play it down.

[Missy M]

6. What Buchanon is saying is no one should have sent Wilson...

to Niger so the truth could come out, per his statement, "We weren't the dumbos who sent Joe, the CIA did it." That is the way I read it anyway. So according to Buchanon he still can't see that they deliberately outed a CIA operative they were just playing the blame game. Is he off his rocker or what.

[Lexingtonian]

12. no, no, that's not quite it

Buchanan isn't saying no crime took place. He's shortcutting a lot.

The White House was, at the time, claiming victory in Iraq and credit for it going well. White House here means Cheney's crew, because Bush is pretty peripheral in it.

But there were two flies in the soup at the time. One was that Saddam Hussein had vanished and that was really embarrassing and kept the victory from being complete. That was the thing they really cared about inside the WH and made them emotional/irrational.

The other thing was the lack-of-WMD problem, and game there was about making the CIA take public responsibility/the fall for it and it all disappear with a couple of firings of people in the Agency. But the CIA people in danger of being fired and their reputations ruined went through their material and found Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson as credible and willing people to make the case against the White House scapegoating.

Buchanan is saying the Plame outing was about the White House sending these CIA people the message that their countering the pinning of blame on them was useless, that they were dispensible and the White House was willing to be ruthless about it. Buchanan is saying these people at the CIA deserved punishment and blame for their part in the WMD lying.

We're draw finer moral distinctions than he does in semi-exonerating Wilson and Tenet among ourselves, but the fact that Wilson and the CIA really only went public in a serious way about the lying long after the State of the Union speech and Powell's UN 'presentation'- essentially, when they started getting scapegoated- is not moral greatness and high integrity either.

[marbuc]

7. Sometimes I really like Pat Buchanan

Then he goes and says something anti-semetic/anti-gay/anti-minority, or something idiotic about Target or other groups/businesses being anti-christian, and I remember why I dislike him.

[Wordie]

14. I feel the same way, although I wouldn't call it "like" even...

I do respect his intelligence, and when he gets it right, he generally does so with an elegant analysis, and an impressive mastery of the facts (although not always).

The problem is when he gets it wrong. The problem in this case appears to be that for some reason, he has chosen to trust Robert Novak's report of what happened.
<snip>
As for the original charge of deliberately and knowingly outing a CIA covert operative, I still can't see it. Novak's second column seems to exonerate totally both his sources of any such charge.

As for the charge that the White House Iraq Group was out to "get" Joe Wilson, this does not seem to stand up either, unless the WHIG did something criminal to discredit him. Wilson's column struck the king and the king's men have as much right to challenge his veracity and motives, and even impeach his character as does a defense attorney dealing with a hostile prosecution witness trying to help convict his client.

And here is what Novak said in that column:
<snip>
During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA's counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger. When I called another official for confirmation, he said: "Oh, you know about it." The published report that somebody in the White House failed to plant this story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn is simply untrue.

So, Buchanan has chosen to believe Novak's explanation of events and the thing is, it does not MATTER what Novak says, because to "out" Plame IS illegal.

AND, in the column, Novak acknowledges that he took it upon himself to make HIS OWN determination of whether Plame would be harmed by the outing, despite being specifically ASKED by the CIA official not to reveal the name. I still wonder why Novak seems to be escaping jeopardy in this case. Wasn't it also illegal for Novak to reveal Plame's name?

For anyone interested, here is a link to that second Novak column on Plame: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/robertnovak/2003/10/01/168398.html

[marbuc]

20. And he's not afraid to challenge the almighty GOP

unlike folks like Tony Blankley (I use as an example because they are side by side every Friday night), who takes every opportunity to shill for the Bush Administration.

[jobycom]

19. Yeah. You know why I think that is? At least for me?

Buchanan is honest and intelligent. He rarely spouts the party line when he disagrees with it, and he is intelligent enough to use reason and logic in his arguments. He doesn't shy away from disagreeing with either side. Hannity, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Coulter, Will, and the rest will say what they think helps the party (or their ideology when it disagrees with the party), and their only purpose is helping their side. No integrity.

Buchanan has integrity in what he says and writes. He's one of the few conservative thinkers left. Like Goldwater. So you like him, or at least I like him, because it's like having an honest debate with someone.

That doesn't mean his views aren't wrong, and sometimes hateful, and for those views he should be condemned. But he feels the same way about our views. Ultimately, I always feel like I disagree with Buchanan, not like he's a evil liar with ulterior motives.

[TexasLawyer]

8. Baloney

They were not trying to kill Valerie's career, but simply saying, "We weren't the dumbos who sent Joe, the CIA did it."

Why is someone a "dumbo" for simply checking out an extremely serious charge toward a country that the US is contemplating an unprecedented pre-emptive attack against?

Shouldn't we, like, maybe, check out the facts before we "shock and awe" the crap out of another country and slaughter them for several decades? Especially when the supposedly incriminating Niger document is an amateurish forgery?

Bushco was systematically punishing anyone who undercut the neo-cons' insane case for war against Iraq.

Wilson's punishment would also serve as warning to anyone else who might be foolish enough to speak truth to power.

[DBoon]

10. You must belong to the "reality based community"

These people don't observe "reality", the "create" reality.

[Humor_In_Cuneiform]

9. The "King's Men" are paid by we the people

I hardly care at all about their so-called rights in this.

There is no constitutional right for those in power to smear their opponents.

This isn't where I want my taxes to go, to pay for clowns and jesters like these bleepin' neocons.

:puke:

[Cassandra]

11. If we were supposed to have a king, this might make sense.

However, we're supposed to have a president who serves all the people, including those who think he's wrong, so Pat is full of shit.

[ncteechur]

15. This still doesn't excue the "king's men" and the "king" from

1. creating forged documents to create a case for war.

2. lying to congress and the American people to go to war.

3. lying to the United Nations and the world for going to war.

They are liars and crooks and should be locked up. There is no excuse. period. And frankly I'm pretty FUCKING sick of these republican shills and apologists making excuses for this bunch of sociopaths. It is like defending Charles Manson.

[ticapnews]

16. I absolutely agree. They do have rights.

They have the right to remain silent. Anything they say can and will be used against them in a court of law. They have to right to an attorney. In the unlikely event they cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to them at the government's expense.

[jobycom]

18. Nicely done. nt

[jobycom]

17. Some good points, some flaws, and some disagreements.

I think Pat is giving his honest assessment, not spinning anything, so I'll assume he believes all this. Most conservatives don't even believe what they are saying, they are just spinning a party line.

My major disagreements are in the peripharies of his comments. Whether anyone technically violated the "outing" law will depend on the facts Fitzgeral collects, but there's another issue people are ignoring. If Rove, Libby, Cheney, or anyone else with clearance confirmed Plame's identity, before or after the leak, they leaked classified information. And that not only violates law, it violates their security clearance. Even if the leak was unintentional, and even if they learned it from the reporters, it still violates their clearance. It is their responsibility to be sure they are not passing on classified info. They should all be out of work with clearances revoked, at the very least.

I agree with him that the WHIG didn't leak this as vengence against Wilson, though they may have been gleeful at that aspect. They leaked it to discredit the CIA, or the CIA faction, trying to escape blame by revealing that the info was false. They were trying to warn the CIA to play their game, or else. A very dramatic, life or death, type of "or else." (IMHO).

As for the old canard about the cover-up being worse than the crime--that's rarely the case. People don't get in trouble for covering up speeding tickets. The crime they cover-up determines how much people care about the cover-up. The reason so many people get punished for the cover-up is because that's the visible part. You've covered up the evidence of the crime, so the part the prosecutor can see is the cover-up. That's what he goes after, knowing that there was something else that he can't get to. The cover-up isn't worse, it's co-equal, and it's the only part left visible.

The one thing I really disagreed with most was the snarky dig at FDR, and not because it was at FDR. Buchanan was belittling Bush's lies by trying to claim, basically, it was a common occurence. First, I'm not sure which lies he means (is he claiming FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to happen, or something else?). Second, and mainly, there is a great difference between secrecy and lies involving a global war already in progress, and starting a war from scratch where none exists. At worst, FDR conned us to get involved in a war we weren't going to avoid anyway. Even if he allowed Pearl Harbor to happen (unlikely), someone else planned it, and if we had avoided it, they would have attacked somewhere, sometime else.

Not the case with Iraq. We lied our way into that invasion, and slaughtered 100K+ people who would likely be alive today if we had not. The first right we hold self-evident and inalienable is LIFE. We took that right from 100K+ people for no reason. That's very different than what FDR did. LBJ would have been a better example, but even there, a war was already under way, to some degree.

That's my biggest problem with Buchanan's article. The implication that the war was okay, even if it was wrong. A nation that claims to be a champion of justice in the world needs higher standards than that. So does a pugnacious old fool of a writer who claims to represent morality.

[MrBenchley]

22. What a fucking idiot Pat is....

Has it occured to him that this country is not a monarchy?

What's funny is, Wilson's column only "struck the king" if you assume the Prince of Petroleum was actually behind the Niger Yellowcake fraud. And why would there be "blame" over a US diplomat discovering that a claim WAS a fraud, otherwise.

[NightOwwl]

24. Quote: "the king's men have as much right to challenge his veracity...

...and motives, and even impeach his character..."

Well OK, challenge his veracity all you want...if you have the facts on your side, it shouldn't be a problem. But we all know they didn't have the facts on their side. They got caught in a huge lie and struck back the only way they knew how. Smear, smear, and smear again. Facts? We don't need no stinking facts! We impeach characters! It's what we do best!

Ah, well...this one quote tells you everything you need to know about this corrupt, evil cabal.

[xchrom]

25. ''outing'' plame to blame the cia?

doesn't that seem a tad clumsy?