Asked about the implications of the President’s interview with Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald, the special counsel appointed to look into the "outing" of a CIA agent by hawkish government officials, White House spokesman Scott McClellan wasn’t lying when he replied:
"No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the president of the United States."
Reflexive Bush-haters are quick to dismiss this as obfuscating rhetoric, meaningless noises emitted as a matter of course, like other bodily functions best unnamed. Yet I believe McClellan, if only because the President, in an important sense, is as much the victim as the perpetrator of the crimes under investigation. A lot is going on here, and yet, so far, only one or another tentacle of the monster has surfaced at a time, with the details of Fitzgerald’s multi-pronged investigation kept under wraps. The interrogation of the President, however, indicates that the creature is about to surface, along with some indictments.
We don’t know what was said during the interview, a little over an hour long, but we can tease out a few safe surmises from the tangle of speculation. First, whomever "outed" CIA agent Valerie Plame in order to get at her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson – a prominent critic of the Iraq war – probably didn’t get their orders directly from the President. Secondly, assuming Dubya didn’t personally get on the phone to columnist Bob Novak and divulge Ms. Plame’s identity and occupation, it was probably one of his henchmen, or, more likely, one of Dick Cheney’s minions, although we can be fairly certain the President didn’t issue a direct order to that effect.
So why question the President?
The reason is because it’s very likely that the investigation has branched out considerably since Attorney General John Ashcroft stepped aside and let Fitzgerald take on the case.
The "outing" of Valerie Plame – a CIA agent involved in sensitive nuclear proliferation work – came about as a result of the War Party’s attempt to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who had gone public with the truth about Saddam’s alleged attempts to secure high-grade uranium in the African country of Niger. The President, in his State of the Union address, had announced this evil intention of the Iraqi dictator as a rationale for going to war, but Wilson revealed that he had been sent by the CIA to that country in an effort to learn the facts, and had found no evidence for the accusation. The War Party had been caught in a rather embarrassing lie: badly stung, they struck back….
The rumor was spread that Wilson, supposedly a partisan Democrat, had gotten himself the (non-paying) job of going to Niger entirely on account of his wife’s influence, and, besides that, he was said to have no special expertise in this area. That’s horse-hockey: having served as an ambassador in the region for a decade, Wilson certainly had the experience and the contacts for the job. His only disqualification seemed to be that he was a professional diplomat who saw his job as reporting reality, rather than some party-lining neoconservative who sees everything through the distorting prism of ideology.
Furthermore, it turned out that the alleged documentary evidence pointing to Iraq’s guilt in this matter were crude forgeries. The President of the United States had been made a fool of – which, in George W. Bush’s case, may seem redundant, and therefore all the more humiliating.
When you start turning over rocks, all kinds of creepy-crawlies go skittering for cover, and if you disturb enough turf whole swarms will come pouring out of their holes, blinded by the sunlight and bumping into each other, desperate to regain the darkness. And that’s what’s been happening lately, with charges of espionage openly leveled against Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) by the U.S. intelligence community. Patrick Lang, former head of the CIA’s Middle East desk, told Newsday that the U.S.-funded INC "intelligence collection" program had essentially functioned as an Iranian spy network:
"’They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,’ he said. Lang described it as ‘one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history…I’m a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work.’"
Eager to rid themselves of their old Iraqi enemy, and pave the way for the southward extension of their own influence, the Iranians fed Chalabi a stream of lies, possibly including the Niger uranium forgeries. The "intelligence" gleaned from these dubious documents somehow wormed its way into the President’s state of the union address through some process that can only be described as treason.
Chalabi, the favorite of the neoconservatives centered in the Vice President’s office and the civilian upper echelons of the Pentagon, regularly fed the White House (and the American media) dubious "intelligence" that went unvetted by the mainline intelligence agencies, and was "stove-piped" via Cheney directly onto the President’s desk. If Chalabi, the Great Embezzler, ripped off the White House with fake "evidence" of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions, and if this caused the administration no end of political embarrassment – remember the infamous "16 words" controversy? – then no wonder they cut off his allowance and raided his Baghdad headquarters.
But Chalabi didn’t act alone: he had loyal friends and supporters inside the administration, who flew him to Iraq after the "liberation" and touted him endlessly and openly as the George Washington of his country – and the neocons defend him to this day. The Office of Special Plans, under Pentagon policy honcho Douglas Feith, functioned as a disinformation factory, taking the raw lies wholesaled by Chalabi’s operation and retailing them as finished "intelligence."
If Chalabi got his hands on top secret information, and then passed it to the Iranians, then who in the U.S. government were his collaborators – and what other joint projects did Chalabi and his American fan club undertake?
Is it really a coincidence that Fitzgerald is questioning the President while FBI agents set up a polygraph machine in the Pentagon?
Whoever "outed" Valerie Plame had one goal in mind: to discredit her husband, who had exposed the Niger uranium gambit as a hoax. To suspect that the same crew knows a lot about the true origins of the Niger uranium forgeries hardly requires an imaginative leap. Back in February, when the Washington Post reported very "aggressive" questioning of White House aides, it wasn’t only the Plame case FBI agents seemed concerned about:
"A parallel FBI investigation into the apparent forgery of documents suggesting that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger is ‘at a critical stage,’ according to a senior law enforcement official who declined to elaborate. That probe, conducted by FBI counterintelligence agents, was launched last spring after U.N. officials pronounced the documents crude forgeries."
It seems logical to assume that George W. Bush’s testimony in this matter would be far more relevant, and interesting, than his no doubt limited knowledge of the Plame affair.
In any case, what fascinates is the interconnectedness of the various scandals that threaten to engulf this administration – WMD-gate, Chalabi-gate, Niger-gate, etc., etc. All share a common narrative thread, the theme of some foreign or outside force manipulating the White House to achieve its own ends. Chalabi figured prominently in all these deceptions, but he was just an instrument in the hands of the neocons, who used him as a front man for their foreign policy agenda.
It’s all very cloak-and-daggerish, with spy-versus-spy plots and counter-plots, and, with so many layers of deception, somewhat confusing. But we can see what this complicated game was all about if we look at the results, i.e. what is happening on the ground in Iraq. As Iran takes the southern provinces, and the Israelis extend their influence into the northern part of the country, where the Kurds predominate, the real allegiances of the various players stand revealed.
