 Whatever Happened to Loose Lips Sink Ships?
Let me see if I have this straight. Former Dep Sec’y of State Richard Armitage, a self-described “terrible gossip,” (poor thing, it must have been so difficult for him having that top security clearance) is the jamoke who outed Valerie Plame to both Bob Woodward and Robert Novak. Not just one of them, but both. Armitage’s defense: he was just dishing like any DC desk jockey with nothing better to do.
So, when Karl Rove told Matt Cooper of Time Magazine the identity of the same undercover CIA agent, and when VP Cheney’s right-claw man, Scooter Libby, also blabbed it to Cooper and NYT reporter Judith Miller, by then it was all just Beltway common knowledge. Valerie Plame was, as Rove put it when the shit hit the fan, “Fair game.”
All this was done – and nobody is denying it – to discredit Amb Joe Wilson’s assertions in an NYT OpEd in July 2003 discrediting Pres Bush’s claim to the American people that Saddam Hussein had bought nuclear weapons-grade uranium from Niger. Wilson has long-since been proven right, and Bush wrong. And wrong is the nicest way to put it.
Based on this sequence of events, both the Washington Post and the NYT declared the Plame controversy dead. Now I realize that I’m just a blogger, and I’m sure I must be missing something, but I have a few questions that I don’t ever expect answers to:
If Rove and Libby got their info from Novak, and then used it to discredit Wilson, how does that fit into Bush’s promise to fire the leaker – who “may never be caught?”
Will Armitage do some time, or is s gossip allowed under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act?
Libby has been charged with lying to the FBI. If he had nothing to hide, why’d he lie?
What did Judith Miller spend 12 weeks in the federal lock-up for, exactly?
Novak described his source as “not a partisan gunslinger,” adding “when you learn who it is, I think you’ll be surprised.” Wrong again, Bob. Armitage isn’t a partisan gunslinger? After his long career in the US Navy ended in 1980, he worked for Bob Dole, Ronald Reagan, GHW Bush, and GW Bush. When Bill Clinton was in office, he worked in the private sector. He’s currently a member of the board of directors of ConocoPhillips oil company, which in 2004 won the concession to develop the West Qurna oil fields in Iraq. He’s also a foreign policy advisor to John McCain’s nascent presidential campaign. What’s he have to do to be considered partisan – run for RNC chair?
Armitage gets a pass from the MSM because he was the only member of the administration to have reservations about the war. But his objections were logistical, not ideological. Armitage wasn’t satisfied with the Rummy Doctrine of “You got to war with the army that you have, not the army that you want.” Out of necessity, that was true on Dec 8, 1941, but certainly not in the context of a pre-emptive war against an enemy that posed no immediate threat. And rather than rush in, Armitage wanted to ramp the up military first. Or at least have a plan.
Nevertheless, the word is that Armitage had no dog in the Iraq fight, and therefore had no agenda behind running his mouth about Plame and Wilson to journalists. But the truth is that Armitage is a hardcore neocon who’d been itching to take Saddam on for years. In 1998, he signed the The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) letter to Pres Bill Clinton, all-but demanding Saddam Hussein’s ouster expressly because he was developing weapons of mass destruction.
And in Jan 2003, no less than the Voice of America reported: This, as both countries continue a massive military build up in the Persian Gulf in preparation for a possible invasion of Iraq, something Deputy U.S. Secretary of State Richard Armitage now suggests is all but inevitable.
"Our other options are just about exhausted at this point," Mr. Armitage said.
Casting further pessimism on hope that war can be avoided, he released a report detailing how Iraq has repeatedly lied to weapons inspectors.
"This regime has very little time left to undo the legacy of twelve years. There is no sign, there is not one sign, that the regime has any intent to comply fully with the terms of (UN) Resolution 14-41, just as it has ailed to comply with any of the other 16 UN Security Council resolutions," Mr. Armitage said.
When Armitage read his old pal and fellow swabbie Bob Woodward's testimony describing his source on the Plame story, he reportedly ran to the phone in a tizzy to spill his guts to his former boss, Sec’y of State Colin Powell.
“I think he’s talking about me!” the distraught Armitage told him. Naturally he felt just horrible, because, jeez, it was only a bit of gossip to not one, but two A-List Washington columnists. Never in his wildest dreams did he expect that juicy stuff to find its way into print. Especially since he hadn’t told them it was off the record. Woodward, who has walked on the spook-side himself, kept it under his cap. Novak – well, Novak is Novak.
If Armitage was looking for someone to serve him his penance, I’m not sure Colin Powell was the best choice. Powell’s Oscar-winning PowerPoint presentation at the UN, alerting the member nations to the incontrovertible existence of “mobile biological weapons labs” in Iraq put a lot of pep into the march to war. The fact that they turned out to be helium generators for weather and surveillance balloons caused Powell to later lament that his over-reaching speech that day in the UN General Assembly was “the darkest point in my public career.”
Honestly? What about covering up the My Lai massacre when he was a captain in Vietnam? Or managing and funding the illegal Contra war in Nicaragua under Adm John Poindexter, Ronald Reagan’s disgraced National Security Advisor? And what about the time he defied his Commander-in-Chief on the steps of the White House, telling the press he disagreed with Bill Clinton’s gays in the military policy? But he’s right – helping to start a pointless war trumps all the other dark moments in his very dark career.
How these new revelations diminish, rather than broaden special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Plame-Wilson fiasco remains to be seen – but probably not until after the 2006 midterm elections. 
~Jack McEnany
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