Needlenose

The predictable cry at the beginning of any White House scandal is for an independent prosecutor to be named.

At the Left Coaster, Steve Soto has a list of quotes from Republicans calling for special prosecutors to be named during the Clinton era, and Billmon (who reiterates his opinion here) and Atrios (who offers a petition to sign) use it as a basis for advocating an independent counsel in Valerie Plame controversy. Separately, Chris Andersen joins the parade as well.

I’d give my simple response here, but I’ve already given it away in the title of this post.

What’s happened so far is really a best-case scenario for anyone looking for a legal form of retribution against the Bushites. However corrupt John Ashcroft may be, his greatest chance for influence was before any formal criminal investigation began — specifically, in keeping the CIA request for a probe from getting to the formal stage.

Now that a genuine investigation has begun, career FBI and Justice Department employees who may not be partisan and/or corrupt may have a stake in it, and ensure that it keeps moving ahead honestly.

There’s always the substantial chance that they will prove as morally flexible as Ashcroft, but there’s also the chance that they won’t be. If Ashcroft were to handpick an “independent” counsel, however, you know the guy (and I’m 99% certain it would be a guy, but that’s beside the point) will have been carefully vetted for his, ummm, “loyalty” and “discretion.”

In other words, if Ashcroft picks who investigates, you might as well not have an investigation. Hell, he’d probably be tempted to pick Ken Starr.

Come to think of it, I’m surprised that Dubya’s gang wasn’t better prepared to turn the tables on their Democratic accusers by arranging the sudden appointment of some Starr-like figure. Be careful what you wish for, everybody!

Follow me, if you dare, into the world of textual analysis and journalistic sourcing . . .

The Washington Post article on Saturday night that kicked off the Valerie Plame scandal described its key revelation as follows:

. . . a senior administration official said that . . . two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife.

A follow-up article on Sunday night initially repeated this description (“An administration official told The Washington Post on Saturday that two White House officials leaked the information to selected journalists to discredit Wilson”), but seemed to switch gears a full fourteen paragraphs later:

An administration aide told The Post on Saturday that the two White House officials had cold-called at least six Washington journalists and identified Wilson’s wife.

Whoa — how did “a senior administration official” become “an administration aide”? Was this a second source? The similar information about “at least six journalists” suggests not. Later on Sunday night, Atrios tried to address the apparent discrepancy:

Perhaps they were trying to be revealing. Consider the intersection of the set which contains “senior administration official” and the one which contains “administration aide.” Get those Venn diagrams cooking…

Interestingly, reviewing names from a list of administration personnel also found via Atrios, one name from the White House press/communications office qualifies:

Dan Bartlett – Assistant to the President for Communications

What’s significant about this? Well, I came across this unnoticed scoop in a comments thread at Calpundit, quoting an appearance of Newsweek writer Howard Fineman on CNBC’s “Hardball,” hosted by Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: Well, the “Washington Post” is a very credible organization in Washington, D.C. Is that the main source that everybody is pegging this to? Their report from a Saturday source, apparently, that the administration or two people in the White House were making these calls to leak this information about Joe Wilson‘s wife, Howard?

FINEMAN: Well, it was in the Sunday “Washington Post.” Yes, that‘s the main thing that got this going again. But in my own calling around, I have some people inside the White House telling me the same thing. They‘re making the allegation, not for attribution, that yes, in fact, there were people inside the White House leaking, inside the White House complex. And, you know, these are people that I‘ve talked to before who know what they‘re talking about, usually.

And what‘s of interest to me here is that you seem to have a fight going on behind the scenes to see who, if anybody, is going to come forward and admit something. Who‘s going to actually finger somebody else on the record.

Do you see where this is leading? Let’s assume that Karl Rove and former press secretary Ari Fleischer were the two leakers (and to the best of my knowledge, they are the two top White House employees who would have the most frequent direct contact with reporters).

Now suppose Bartlett knows that they’re the culprits — which is plausible — and also knows that keeping silent about a felony is a crime in itself, or simply has an uncharacteristic attack of conscience. Suppose he decides he doesn’t intend to go down with the ship. Could he be the “senior administration official” AND “administration aide” who tipped off the Washington Post?

If the assumption that CIA director George Tenet has turned irrevocably against them is bad news for the Bushites, the possibility that one of their key henchmen has done so is even worse. And if both of them have gone over the wall, well . . .

Update: Joshua Marshall has another scoop at Talking Points Memo . . . a follow-up White House staff memo about the investigation apparently “outs” two more of the reporters who got White House leaks about Valerie Plame — Knut Royce and Timothy Phelps of Newsday (unless this is some sort of “counter-investigation” of any CIA official who confirmed Plame’s status in a Phelps/Royce article that Marshall just linked to).

I went to a panel discussion sponsored by the ‘=http://www.scc-democrats.org/hightechdemsHigh Tech Dems[/url]‘ group last night regarding privacy issues after 9/11. It was a rather genteel affair, in spite of the fact that it included both Lee Tien, a senior attorney at the =http://www.eff.orgElectronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)[/url] and a ‘surprise guest,’ Ron W. Nadel, a shill for the US Attorney’s Office. After months of unsuccessfully trying to find a panelist willing to defend the Patriot Act, I guess word came from down-on-high that Ashcroft’s minions were obliged to follow their boss’ road-trip example and do their part in selling Americans on gracefully relinquishing their civil liberties.

Anyway, the participants didn’t really mix it up much, and they covered too much territory for a one hour discussion, but a few interesting points did arise (Okay I’ll get off my lazy ass, bring in a tape recorder and transcribe the interesting bits next time!). While Nadel tryed to characterize the Patriot Act as a mere ‘streamlining’ of legal procedures involved in electronic surveillance, Tien made the salient point that in the case of a wire-tap, if the government doesn’t find anything useful resulting from an investigation, they are bound to inform you of the fact and details of the surveillance. With the investigations made possible by the Patriot Act, however, if Ashcroft and Nadel go on a fishing expedition, but find nothing, there is no obligation to inform you that your emails, browsed sites and reading list were even surveyed.

Tien made the good quote of the evening, saying that what we have to worry about with the Patriot Act and related hastily-passed legislation “isn’t Orwell…it’s Kafka,” referring, undoubtedly to works like The Trial, and The Castle, where the protagonists are persecuted and prosecuted by the government without even knowing why.

…poverty, for one thing. Under the reign of King George the Witless, 3 million more Americans have slipped into poverty. How long do you think it will take President Dumbass to exercise the ‘Reagan Option’ and whisk away the pesky poor by redefining (downwards) the poverty line? Or maybe he could do his spiritual leader one better and follow the California Prop 54 path and simply forbid the Federal government from collecting any statistics on the subject! Let’s call that the Repug ‘See No Evil’ strategy. Maybe Dubya could set up an agency to erase all information on the subject of inequality, the ‘Total Information Un-Awareness Office.’

Oh and while we’re on the subject of class warfare, DeLay and Dubya are also ‘conserving’ health care – apparently since Dubya stole office, there are now 6% more Americans living without health insurance (for a total of 15.2% of the country). This reminds me of a conversation I had with a rich, fat white doctor at his birthday party in Los Altos (a wealthy Silicon Valley suburb) during Clinton’s failed attempt to establish a single-payer health care system.

“They will end up rationing health-care,” the (retired) guy ranted to a cluster of well-off young professionals. “They’ll deny liver and heart transplants to elderly patients!”

I turned to him and said “They already ration healthcare, sir…have you heard of poverty?” He stared at me, mouth gaping open, then turned on his heels and walked way from me.

As I noted in my post this morning, the motivation for the Washington Post leak/wake-up call regarding Valerie Plame was frustration over the lack of action on the case by the Justice Department, which had been sitting on the case since sometime in July.

Well, not any more. Tonight, the New York Times reports that the FBI is now officially on the case, although this is only discussed briefly in the opening and closing of the article:

Mr. Ashcroft decided over the last several days to move ahead with a preliminary inquiry, and the Justice Department notified the F.B.I. late today that the bureau would lead the investigation.

I think it’s safe to suggest that Ashcroft’s “decision” was aided, just ever so slightly, by the anonymous bombshell dropped in the Post over the weekend.

So, who runs the FBI now, anyway? How independent are they? Is there a chance that this can go anywhere without the CIA firing off more warning shots?

We’ll be watching.

Update: Now the Washington Post chimes in, missing the FBI scoop but offering some new tidbits of its own:

– An eye-catching comment, with a meaning I’m not certain of yet: “Word of the Justice probe emerged over the weekend after the CIA briefed lawmakers on it last week.”

– After first showing no interest in the matter, the Bush administration is now talking a tougher game:

Scott McClellan, Bush’s press secretary . . . said that “if anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.”

. . . A senior official quoted Bush as saying, “I want to get to the bottom of this,” during a meeting yesterday morning with a few top aides, including Rove.

(Why yes, Susan Schmidt did contribute to this story. Why do you ask?)

– Another journalist anonymously “confirmed receiving a call from an administration official” leaking the information about Plame before Robert Novak’s initial article revealing her name appeared.

– More Schmidt-worthy material about the administration’s possible attempt at an escape hatch:

Neither the Novak nor the Time account mentioned that Plame had worked as an undercover operative, which indicates those who leaked the information may not have known she was . . .

Wilson said the series of similar calls he received, which included four journalists from three networks, stopped on July 22, after he appeared on NBC’s “Today” show and said the disclosure of his wife’s maiden name could jeopardize the “entire network that she may have established.”

(Note: The first sentence in the quote is not quite correct. Novak’s original article called Plame an “operative,” though it did not explicitly say she was working under cover.)

– If you’re into reading journalistic tea leaves, a hint of who might be one of the nefarious White House leakers:

An article that appeared on the Time magazine Web site the same week Novak’s column was published said that “some government officials have noted to Time in interviews . . . that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” The same article quoted from an interview with I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, saying that Cheney did not know about Wilson’s mission “until this year when it became public in the last month or so.”

(The juxtaposition of sentences may be a subtle message that Libby was the source for both comments, going “off the record” for the Plame details.)

This is obviously going to keep developing. As I said, we’ll be watching.

The job of being the official White House spokesliar can’t be much fun. Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo posts, in full and excruciating detail, a Q & A session between Scott McClellan and the White House press corps.

Within his first three answers, McClellan exhausts the spin points he’s been authorized to make:

. . . the President believes if someone leaked classified information, particularly of this nature, that it is a serious matter and it should be looked into and pursued to the fullest extent possible. The Department of Justice would be the appropriate agency to do so.

. . . in any matter like this, we would cooperate with the Department of Justice.

. . . There has been no information brought to us or that has come to our attention, beyond the media reports, to suggest that there was White House involvement.

After this, poor Scott tries to rephrase these points (occasionally working in his initial vague denial from July, “That is not the way this White House operates”) to answer the next several dozen questions, in what reads like an overstretched “Saturday Night Live” skit.

The most inadvertently revealing part is where reporters ask if Karl Rove has specifically denied leaking Valerie Plame’s name . . . and McClellan twists and squirms, because he can’t bring himself to say yes:

QUESTION: You spoke directly with Rove about this?
McCLELLAN: I have spoken — I speak to him all the time, on a lot of things.

QUESTION: He categorically denied to you –

McCLELLAN: I just told you, it’s simply not true.

QUESTION: Yes, but you refuse to say whether or not it was Rove who told you it’s untrue.

McCLELLAN: No, no, I spoke to Rove. I spoke to him about — no, I spoke to him about these accusations, I’ve spoken to him.

QUESTION: And Rove told you that they were not true –

McCLELLAN: That’s why I would be telling –

QUESTION: — or is it just you –

McCLELLAN: That’s why I would be telling you what I did.

QUESTION: — or is it just you who is telling us?

McCLELLAN: No, I have spoken to him and been assured. And that’s why I reported to you and reported to the media that it is simply not true.

Like I said, that job can’t be any fun.

WaPo polls Iraqis
Juan Cole on polls (Shia only polled in Basra)

Tom Spencer suggests that it has to be Rove because of the WH’s non-reaction and the press’s as well.

Plame’s codes
Sometimes, I don’t post as much here as I would like because I spend so much time learning what’s going on (and double-checking information, then re-checking for the latest developments, and so on) that there’s no time left to write about it. Which is basically what happened this weekend with the Watergate-like scandal developing in the Bush administration regarding CIA employee Valerie Plame.

To recap for anyone who hasn’t been following along elsewhere, this all started when former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson went public in saying that the Bushites had distorted or ignored intelligence information in their PR campaign for war in Iraq, using information he had gathered on behalf of the CIA as an example. Within the following week, a couple of White House types decided it would be smart to smear Wilson and send a message to other possible whistle-blowers by telling reporters that Wilson had only gotten his assignment because his wife (Valerie Plame), a CIA operative, had suggested it.

Apparently these geniuses didn’t realize that exposing an undercover CIA employee is a felony, or that they might be messing with wrong crowd in escalating what had already been widely rumored hostility to the level of open warfare.

Wilson and the CIA knew it was a felony, though, and appear to have reacted accordingly. This morning’s Washington Post says that “CIA officials approached the Justice Department about a possible investigation within a week” after a newspaper column mentioned Plame, and Wilson made a now-somewhat-famous =http://slate.msn.com/id/2088471undiplomatic comment[/url] in August:

It’s of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words.

This is where the intrigue starts to happen. Whatever the nature of the CIA’s “approach” to the Justice Department about a criminal investigation, John Ashcroft’s department apparently did nothing for two months. (The official White House spokesperson reflected a similarly curious lack of curiosity back in July.)

Perhaps annoyed by the failure of the WH and Justice dogs to bark, a “senior administration official” (most likely from the CIA, but that’s not certain) took the case to the Washington Post this weekend — saying that “two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife.” By adding that “The official would not name the leakers for the record,” the article implied he knew who the White House miscreants were (and in fact had named them off the record).

Even in the face of at least a half-dozen journalists and an apparently hostile department in their own administration knowing who the criminals are, however, the White House has continued to deny everything, saying that it knows of no wrongdoing and doesn’t intend to look for any. Why? Maybe they’re confident that John Ashcroft is corrupt enough to keep anything from ever happening at the Justice Department, no matter what is revealed by the papers. Maybe they just don’t know what to say, and are secretly terrified.

Or maybe they know, as Billmon points out, that investigations of leaks (illegal or otherwise) historically go nowhere. Even the journalists who have firsthand knowledge of the crime because Karl Rove, or whoever, called them with the information have a strong motivation to remain silent — regardless of the circumstances, reporters who spill the beans on a source are on shakier ground in dealing with future sources. And so the White House is depending on this code of silence to save their bacon.

But there’s one factor that hasn’t been accounted for, someone who may know all the details and has no reason to keep any secrets — and that’s Joseph Wilson himself. As today’s Post article notes, the reporters who got the details about Plame from the White House promptly called him for a reaction (“Wilson said in a telephone interview that four reporters from three television networks called him in July and told him that White House officials had contacted them to encourage stories that would include his wife’s identity . . . . Wilson identified one of the reporters as Andrea Mitchell of NBC News.“)

By naming these reporters, Wilson puts them in the awkward position of admitting that they are writing about a criminal investigation when they already know who the guilty party is, but won’t tell. How long will it be before Wilson names all of the reporters who called him? And what if one of them let slip exactly who in the White House gave them the information — and Wilson makes that public, too?

Update: This morning, Wilson said he doesn’t know who the leaker was:

“In one speech I gave out in Seattle not too long ago, I mentioned the name Karl Rove,” he said. “I think I was probably carried away by the spirit of the moment. I don’t have any knowledge that Karl Rove himself was either the leaker or the authorizer of the leak. But I have great confidence that, at a minimum, he condoned it and certainly did nothing to shut it down.”

I think, though, that it’s only a matter of time before he names all of the reporters who do know, putting all of them on the spot.

But wait, there’s more: Wilson speaks again in an Associated Press phone interview:

“I did not mean at that time to imply that I thought that Karl Rove was the source or the authorizer, just that I thought that it came from the White House, and Karl Rove was the personification of the White House political operation,” Wilson said in a telephone interview.

But then he added: “I have people, who I have confidence in, who have indicated to me that he (Rove), at a minimum, condoned it and certainly did nothing to put a stop to it for a week after it was out there.

“Among the phone calls I received were those that said `White House sources are saying that it’s not about the 16 words, it’s about Wilson and his wife.’ And two people called me up and specifically mentioned Rove’s name,” he said.

Please revert to the originally projected scenario. Next installment: Wilson says who mentioned Rove’s name . . .

Edwards tamely questions ClarkLongtime virtual comrade =http://interestingtimes.blogspot.comChris Andersen[/url] has posted a pledge for all of us online progressives not to let favoritism for one Democratic candidate for President lead to unwarranted bashing of the others — since any of them is preferable to the clear and present danger known as George W. Bush:

We hold this truth to be self-evident: Having George W. Bush as President has been and will continue to be a disaster.

We will not let our partisanship towards any particular candidate for President cause us to lose sight of this basic truth. As such, we pledge ourselves not to become enablers of any campaign designed to divide us in our struggle to remove Bush from power. We pledge that no more will we be:

– Tools of those who would disrupt the Anybody-But-Bush movement.

– Partisans who would rather bring down the other guy’s candidate than find reason to elevate our own.

– Dupes who will automatically assume that anything negative about the other guy’s candidate is more likely to be true than the negative things said about our guy.

– Fools who lose sight of the ultimate goal: the defeat of George W. Bush on November 2nd, 2004.

We will uphold this pledge to the best of our ability.

We will encourage others to do the same.

This we do solemnly swear.

On behalf of Needlenose, I’m willing to sign on. (Uhh, Green Boy, let me know if you disagree, okay?!) But ironically, someone better notify Chris A.’s favored candidate, Howard Dean, who on today’s Sunday talk shows sneered at Richard Gephardt as one of the “Washington Democrats who are part of the problem and not part of the solution” and said of Wesley Clark, “He was a Republican until 25 days ago.”

I know candidates like Gephardt have been baiting Dean with their own harsh rhetoric, but that’s to be expected from desperate, fading candidates. It’s up to Dean to avoid being dragged down to their level.

Today’s New York Times further documents the complaints of our hand-picked Iraqi government about the U.S. administration. The article also expands on why, despite universal pressure — including internal reasons — to bail out quickly, the U.S. government insists on clinging to power in Iraq for the foreseeable future:

Some senior American and British officials say privately that they are concerned that if an election was held today, a Shiite muslim cleric might well dominate the polling on the strength of the 60 percent Shiite share of the population.

Many Iraqis today say such concerns are exaggerated, that Shiites are divided along secular and religious lines and are unlikely to vote as a bloc unless they perceive a threat that they will be disenfranchised as they were in 1932, when the British withdrawal and Sunni duplicity excluded them from political power.

Still, senior American officials say they are hoping that six months to a year of constitution writing and preparations for national elections will provide a process from which a moderate and secular Shiite leader will emerge to head the first democratic government here, one that would have the independence and self-assurance to avoid tilting toward the conservative Islamists of Iran.

For their sake, I’d like to hope that the search for this unicorn-like leader will go a bit better than the last recruitment effort . . . but I can’t say my expectations are very high.

=http://slate.msn.com/id/2088895Suellentrop on debate[/url]
=http://slate.msn.com/id/2088894Saletan on debate[/url]

Our progressive-weblog credentials would probably be revoked if we didn’t mention today’s Census Bureau report on the poverty rate, which shows more Americans in poverty and the median income declining.

Calpundit nicely puts this in context by contrasting the higher poverty rate with

John Edwards
Paul Krugman
Over at
TPM on graft-ready setup in Iraq