10-19-2005
This
posting is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/the-most-important-crimin_b_9183.html
If special counsel
Patrick Fitzgerald
delivers indictments of a few functionaries of the vice president’s
office or
the White House, we are likely to have on our hands a constitutional
crisis.
The evidence of widespread wrongdoing and conspiracy is before every
American
with a cheap laptop and a cable television subscription. And we do not
have the
same powers of subpoena granted to Fitzgerald.
We
know, however, based
upon what we have read and seen and heard that someone created fake
documents
related to Niger and Iraq and used them as a false pretense to launch
America
into an invasion of Iraq. And when a former diplomat made an honest
effort to
find out the facts, a plan was hatched to both discredit and punish him
by
revealing the identity of his undercover CIA agent wife.
Patrick Fitzgerald
has before him the most
important criminal case in American history. Watergate, by comparison,
was a
random burglary in an age of innocence. The investigator’s
prosecutorial
authority in this present case is not constrained by any regulation. If
he
finds a thread connecting the leak to something greater, Fitzgerald has
the
legal power to follow it to the web in search of the spider. It seems
unlikely,
then, that he would simply go after the leakers and the people who
sought to
cover up the leak when it was merely a secondary consequence of the
much
greater crime of forging evidence to foment war. Fitzgerald did not
earn his
reputation as an Irish alligator by going after the little guy.
Presumably, he
is trying to find evidence that Karl Rove launched a covert operation
to create
the forged documents and then conspired to out Valerie Plame when he
learned
the fraud was being uncovered by Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph
Wilson. As
much as this sounds like the plot of a John le Carre novel, it also
comports
with the profile of the Karl Rove I have known, watched, traveled with
and
written about for the past 25 years.
We may stand witness
to a definitive
American moment of democracy. The son of a New York doorman probably
has in his
hands, in many ways, the fate of the republic. Because far too many of
us know
and are aware of the crimes committed by our government in our name, we
are
unlikely to settle for a handful of minor indictments of bureaucrats.
The last
thing most of us believe in is the rule of law. We do not trust our
government
or the people we have elected but our constitution is still very much
alive and
we choose to believe that destiny has placed Patrick Fitzgerald at this
time
and this place in our history to save us from the people we elected. If
the law
cannot get to the truth of what has happened to the American people
under the
Bush administration, then we all may begin to hear the early death
rattles of
history’s greatest democracy.
Fortunately, there
are good signs.
Fitzgerald has reportedly asked for a copy of the Italian government’s
investigation into the break-in of the Niger embassy in Rome and the
source of
the forged documents. The blatantly fake papers, which purported to
show that
Saddam Hussein had cut a deal to get yellowcake uranium from Niger,
turned up
after a December 2001 meeting in Rome involving neo-con Michael Ledeen,
Larry
Franklin, Harold Rhodes, and Niccolo Pollari, the head of Italy’s
intelligence
agency SISMI, and Antonio Martino, the Italian defense minister.
If Fitzgerald is
examining the possibility
that Ledeen was executing a plan to help his friend Karl Rove build a
case for
invading Iraq? Ledeen has long ties to Italian intelligence agency
operatives
and has spanned the globe to bring the world the constant variety of
what he
calls “creative destruction” to build democracies. He makes the other
neo-cons
appear passive. He brought the Reagan administration together with the
Iranian
arms dealer who dragged the country through Iran-Contra and shares with
his
close friend Karl Rove a personal obsession with Machiavelli. Ledeen,
who is
almost rabidly anti-Arab, famously told the Washington Post that Karl
Rove told
him, “Any time you have a good idea, tell me.”
The federal grand
jury has to at least
consider whether Ledeen called Rove with an idea to use his contacts
with the
Italian CIA to hatch a plan to create the rationale for war. Ledeen
told radio
interviewer Ian Masters and his producer Louis Vandenberg, “I have
absolutely
no connection to the Niger documents, have never even seen them. I did
not work
on them, never handled them, know virtually nothing about them, don't
think I
ever wrote or said anything about the subject.” It is strictly
coincidence then
that some months after he and his neo-con consorts and Italian
intelligence
officers met in Rome that the Niger embassy was illegally entered and
nothing
was stolen other than letterhead and seals. And equally coincident that
forged
papers under those letterheads were slipped to Elisabetta Burba, a
writer for
an Italian glossy owned by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister,
and a
backer of the Bush invasion scheme. Unfortunately for the pro-war
neo-cons,
even an Italian tabloid would not publish the fake documents and turned
them
over to the CIA and US government in Rome.
The other American
attendees at Ledeen’s
Roman Holiday are also worthy of scrutiny. Larry Franklin was recently
arrested
for leaking classified US government information to the American Israel
Public
Affairs Committee. Ledeen sprang quickly to his defense but Franklin
faces
prosecution next year and is most probably cooperating with prosecutor
Fitzgerald. Harold Rhode, the other American actor in this tragicomic
affair,
worked the Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Department of Defense
for Vice
President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Characterized as a
“counter-intelligence shop,” OSP simply interpreted intelligence in a
manner
that fit the need for evidence that Iraq had WMD. If the CIA gathered
data that
said otherwise, OSP analyzed it differently or ignored the facts and
then
reported to the vice president precisely what he wanted to hear. Rhode
also was
the liaison between Ahmed Chalabi, the convicted embezzler the Bush
administration was using to feed information to them and Judy Miller
about the
distortions and lies required to fuel the rush to war.
No great
extrapolation is necessary to
assume that OSP, sitting inside the CIA, got early word that Joseph
Wilson was
being dispatched to Niger to investigate the sale of low-grade uranium
to Iraq.
Rhode needed only to pick up the phone and call the vice president’s
chief of
staff Scooter Libby, who would tell his boss and Karl Rove. How hard is
it for
even Republicans to believe, at this point, that Rove is capable of
launching a
plan to discredit Wilson and punish him by exposing his wife? Rove and
his boss
were not simply in danger of losing the prime cause for the war; they
faced an
even graver political wound of being discovered as covert agents who
defrauded
the government and the public.
I have seen the spawn of Rove’s tortured mind and
watched a hundred of
his political scams unfold and I am confident I know how this one
played out.
Rove might have brought it up with his fellow big brains in the White
House
Iraq Group, a propaganda organization set up to disseminate information
supporting the war. There was likely a consensus to move the plan to
smack down
Wilson out of the White House. Rove always keeps a layer of operatives
between
himself and the person he gets to pull the trigger. Libby was probably
told to
manage it out of the VP’s office to protect the president because Karl
always
takes care of his most prized assets. Libby then likely ordered John
Hannah and
possibly David Wurmser to call the ever-friendly Judy Miller at the New
York
Times and columnist Robert Novak to give them Valerie Plame’s identity.
Rove
knew that Miller would call Libby of Aspen for confirmation and his old
friend
Novak was certain to call Rove who, as an unidentified senior White
House
official, would confirm the identity on background only. Because Novak
is a
partisan gunslinger, he wrote more quickly than Miller and when she saw
the
firestorm his story created, she backed off and has since been trying
to cover
for herself and Libby. Miller’s later claim that she cannot remember
who gave
her the “Valerie Flame” name is as much dissembling as Rove’s
unconvincing
argument that he “forgot” he met with Time reporter Matt Cooper. Karl
Rove can
remember precinct results from 19th century presidential elections. He
neither
forgets nor forgives.
There you have it,
Mr. Prosecutor. To
quote an unreconstructed former Republican presidential candidate, “You
know
it. I know it. And the American people know it.” We expect you also to
have
sufficient evidence to prove all of this. There are many of us who are
on the
verge of losing faith in our democracy. We are convinced that there are
people
within the highest ramparts of American government who are willing to
put our
country at great risk to advance their geo-political vision. We want
our
country back. And all we have left is the power of the law. From what
we know,
you are the right man come forth at the right time.
Prove to us we still
live in a democracy
and a nation of laws.
