Meltdown

A number of fairly incredible things are happening in Washington---where it's hotter than hell in more ways than one. The Democrats held a forum on the Plame affair that revealed just how serious this is, the Bush administration has stopped release of new Iraqi prison torture photos and wants a law to prevent similar photos from Guantanamo and elsewhere, reports have surfaced of Cheney ordering a plan to attack Iran that includes use of nuclear weapons, and the Patriot Act is very close to being made permanent with virtually no public debate.

We’ll try to deal with each of these separately, so for now, some highlights of the Plame hearings.

This was an unofficial forum assembled on Friday morning by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), co-chaired by Dorgan and Congressman Henry Waxman. Some eloquent testimony was given and some action was proposed, but perhaps the quote of the day is this one, from former CIA operations officer Jim Marcinkowski:" Each time the leader of a political party opens his mouth in public to deflect responsibility, the word overseas is loud and clear: Politics in this country does, in fact, trump national security."

Representative Henry Waxman provided context. "The disclosure of Valerie Wilson's identity as an undercover CIA agent is indefensible on many levels. It was an indefensible betrayal of her and her family. It was an indefensible affront to the men and women who are on the front lines of defending America. And it was an indefensible breach of our national security."

He then related the case directly to the Iraq war.

"And it is an issue deeply personal to me. One of the hardest votes that I cast was to authorize the war in Iraq. Like many others, I was torn. But in the end, I sided with the president because of the administration's insistence that Iraq was on the verge of nuclear capability. Today, we know the truth. I was misled, as were the American people. And it was Valerie Plame Wilson's husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, who helped expose what really happened."

"Well, today's New York Times fills in another piece of the puzzle," Waxman continued."In October 2002, CIA Director George Tenet personally called the deputy national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, to stop President Bush from using the uranium claim in his speech in Cincinnati. Around the same time, the CIA sent the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, a memo warning her not to rely on the uranium evidence."

He indicated (as did others later) that this contradicts claims that the Bush White House did not know the claim about Niger and uranium was false before the State of the Union.

In speaking about accountability for the leak, Waxman said, "There is an executive order -- Executive Order 12958 -- that governs protection of national security information. Under this executive order, the White House has an affirmative obligation to take appropriate and prompt corrective action to address the leaks of classified information."

"There's a special standard for Karl Rove: There will be no questions asked and no accountability," Waxman observed. Then he zeroed in on another action that needs to be taken: a full congressional inquiry.

Not only is the president ignoring his obligation, but Congress is refusing to do its job." Waxman said. "There is a simple way to get to the bottom of this scandal: The Republican Congress can hold a hearing as early as next week with Mr. Rove. For the sake of all the men and women who are defending America's freedom, Republicans in Congress should join us in asking questions and getting answers for the American people.”

“They have refused to hold these hearings, and that is why we're doing what we can today, but we can't subpoena Karl Rove or Scooter Libby, and they would refuse to come to appear before us. They would have to come if Congress did its job as a separate and independent branch of government and exercised its oversight responsibility for the protection our nation."

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY)asked her own questions about the extent of this act:

"Aside from Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Colin Powell and Ari Fleischer, who else in the White House had access to the classified memo?"

"Given that so many of the president's men had access to the memo, it is incumbent upon Congress, the special prosecutor and the American people to ask the following difficult question: What did President Bush know about the Valerie Plame leak and when did he know it?

Is it possible that he and Vice President Cheney, along with most of Bush's inner circle, could have known about this plot to exact retribution on Ambassador Wilson at the expense of national security?

Is it possible that President Bush or Vice President Cheney could have been involved themselves?

These are tough, serious questions that must be addressed."


Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) was equally pointed:

"Nobody died in Watergate. And over 1,750 of our sons and daughters are dead in the sands of Iraq. And I have come here to show my respect for our intelligence covert agents and Foreign Service officers who risk their lives to get the truth to the American people."

Senator Dorgan then asked the panel before him for their statements. Larry Johnson had introduced Colonel Patrick Lang as his mentor, and Senator Dorgan added more of his resume.

Col. Patrick Lang--retired senior officer of U.S. military intelligence, Vietnam veteran, a Middle East specialist--spoke of the gathering of intelligence from individuals (so-called human intelligence, or HUMINT) as especially crucial in stopping terrorists, for they offer few opportunities for other kinds of surveillance---they have no missile silos to photograph from satellites, etc. Speaking of human intelligence he said, "it is a peculiarity of this kind of war that that is exactly the kind of intelligence that you have to have. "He suggested the U.S. hasn't done very well in that area so far, but its this area of intelligence that the Plame outing has directly damaged. He called it "an assault on the ability of the United States" to perform human intelligence.

"Why would that be? It's because HUMINT is about human beings. It's about one person, an American person, a case officer in the parlance of the trade, causing some foreign person to trust him enough and to trust his unit and to trust the United States enough to put his life, his fortune and, indeed, his sacred honor in many cases into the hands of this case officer and the American intelligence unit that stands behind this case officer."

Lang was highly persuasive in talking about the reality of what human intelligence gathering means. He even gave it a religious dimension.

“It's all about trust; it's completely about trust. It's about -- I happen to have done a good deal of this kind of work in my life. And the moment in which some person, whether he's an ambassador or a Montagnard in the hills of Vietnam with filed teeth, decides that he's going to trust you enough so that he's going to believe that you will protect him in every way in doing what he is doing, which is extremely dangerous to him and his family and to everyone else, is a magic moment, indeed. It's almost sacramental in a lot of ways, really.

And it imposes on the case officer and the unit behind him in the United States the kind of obligations that are as serious in some ways as the seal of the confessional, really. I mean, I'm a Catholic; I understand exactly what that means."

"And the obligation to protect this person is absolute, in fact. And it's not only absolute from the point of view of morality; it's absolute from the point of view of practicality as well, because if within a practicing clandestine intelligence unit the case officers believe that their superiors will not protect the identity of their sources or their own identity, in fact, in doing things which are dangerous and difficult, then a, kind of, circle of doubt begins to spread, like throwing a rock into the water.

And it spreads in such a way so that if an intelligence service that belongs to a particular country comes to be thought generally in the world as an organization that does not protect its own, does not protect its foreign assets, then the obvious is true in that people are not going to accept recruitment, are not going to work for you. And the smarter they are, the better placed they are, the better educated they are, the less likely they are to accept recruitment and to work for you if they believe that you are not going to fight in the last ditch to protect their identities. And so, this is all completely about trust."

After ex-CIA Larry Johnson was Jim Marcinkowski, who had a rich and varied background in both intelligence (working at different times for the CIA and FBI) and in law enforcement, as a prosecutor and defense attorney. He also was once the president of the Michigan Young Republicans.

He explained how exposing Valerie Plame sent a message that U.S. promises can’t be trusted, heard loud and clear by those overseas who might otherwise help American efforts. That message is made even louder by continued inaction.

“The problem with a refusal to accept responsibility by senior government officials is ongoing, causes greater damage to our national security as well as our ability to collect human intelligence. But the problem of inaction by the government lies not only with government officials, but also with the media, the commentators and other apologists who have no clue as to the workings of the intelligence community."

"Each time the leader of a political party opens his mouth in public to deflect responsibility, the word overseas is loud and clear: Politics in this country does, in fact, trump national security."

"Each time the political machine made up of prime-time patriots and partisan ninnies display their ignorance by deriding Valerie Plame as a mere paper pusher or belittling the varying degrees of cover used to protect our officers or continuing to play partisan politics with our national security, it's a disservice to this country."

He addressed what should have been done.

"Those who take pride in their political ability to divert the issue from the fundamental truth ought to be prepared to take their share of responsibility for the continuing damage done to our national security. When this unprecedented act first occurred, the president could have immediately demanded the resignation of all persons even tangentially involved. Or at a minimum, he could have suspended the security clearances of those persons and placed them on administrative leave. Such methods are routine across the country in every police department, and every American citizen understands that."

There was a surreal moment later when Senator Dorgan was asking Larry Johnson a question about the effect of this affair on the operation Valerie Plame was part of, which was to gather information on possible chemical, biological and nuclear weapons threats to the U.S. Johnson’s answer was interrupted by Dorgan trying to find out from security whether in fact the building was being evacuated, for an apparent bomb threat.

It wasn't, but Johnson's answer may have been lost in the shuffle. But it was on point: "This problem almost certainly damaged intelligence assets that were connected with providing the United States information about rogue states and terrorist organizations trying to acquire chemical, biological and nuclear material. And that goes to the very heart of some of the threats that we face today."