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The Most Important Criminal Case in American History
By James Moore
10/21/05 "Huffington
Post" -- -- 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.
James Moore is an Emmy-winning former television news correspondent
and the co-author of the bestselling, Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove
Made George W. Bush Presidential. He has been writing and reporting
from Texas for the past 25 years on the rise of Rove and Bush and
has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.
He is currently writing a book on the long term consequences for
America of Bush and Rove policies, which will be published next
year.
© 2005 The Huffington Post
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