Karl Rove, the CIA, and Liberal Hypocrisy
Now I'm no fan of Karl Rove, and I definitely think Karl Rove had all the wrong motivations for outing Valerie Plame . . . but aren't these "secret soldiers" we're talking about the same ones who employed Luis Posada Carilles and trained the torturers in Guatemala? And aren't these front companies the same ones that smuggled heroin in the '60's and '70's, ran guns to the Contras in the '80's, and now take detainees to places like Syria and Egypt to be tortured?
An article in the current issue of Time magazine explains the law Rove is accused of violating -- the Intelligence Identitites Protection Act. According to Time's Josh Tyrangiel, the law basicly makes it illegal for a government official to "intentionally exposes an operative, knowing that the U.S. 'is taking affirmative measures to conceal' the operative's identity," or for anyone who repeatedly exposes covert operatives "knowing that the U.S. is protecting their identities and having 'reason to believe' their exposure will damage U.S. intelligence "
The law was passed in 1982 as a delayed reaction to former CIA agent Philip Agee's 1975 memoir, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, in which he revealed the names and activities of a number of other CIA operatives. The passage of the law of course coincided with the peak of an extremely bloody period of CIA orchestrated terror in Latin America.
So why are liberals suddenly invoking the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and making broad proclimations about the importance of defending the sanctity of the CIA's secrets? Part of it is certainly partisan opportunism. But I think there is another force at work here too. A substantial segement of the Democratic Party leadership, led by John Kerry, has deeply embedded itself with disgruntled military, intelligence, and State Department proffessionals like Rand Beers, Joe Wilson, and Richard Clarke. This moteley crew of petty war criminals (Beers headed up the crop fumigation program in Colombia, Clarke was involved in whitewashing the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan in the Clinton years,) is disenchanted with the war in Iraq and upset that the neo-conservatives have taken over the State Department and the Pentagon and displaced the old foreign policy establishment. The CIA is one of the few "national security" agencies where the neo-cons haven't taken hold, and has been involved in a prolonged turf war with the Bushies. Much of the leadership of the Democratic Party is interested in putting the old foreign policy establishment back in place -- going back to the good old days when the U.S. starved Iraqis to death instead of occupying their country and there was plenty of military aid available to keep right wing regimes in power in Latin America. (During the campaign Kerry bemoaned the fact that Bush was unable to protect the governmments of Bolivia and Argentina from popular insurrections.)
Faced with this kind of struggle between two evils, I'm tempted to follow the advice the late Justice Thurgood Marshall was rumored to have given his law clerks -- when one fat cat fights another fat cat, say that you have no jurisdiction. But on second thought, given the legal principles at stake, I think that we Authentic Journalists will have to hold our noses and back Karl Rove if he says that the Intelligence Identities Protection Act violates his First Amendment rights, and back Judith Miller, in her refusal to disclose who did or did not discuss the identity of CIA agents with her -- even if the sources she is protecting are the same lying bastards whose claims she uncritically parrotted in the pages of the New York Times during the lead up to the war in Iraq.
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Priorities
Submitted on July 20th, 2005 by Dan FederRove’s supposed brilliance that liberals are so in awe of and obsessed with was been taught to the rest of Bush’s inner circle long ago, and there are probably 100 young Republican activists out there that could replace him in a heartbeat. Getting rid of him or of one NYT mercenary journalist isn’t going to get us anywhere. But losing the ability to report on and demand transparency from the U.S. security agencies will push the cause of democracy, in the U.S. and in the CIA’s playgrounds around the world, back even farther.
Time for well-meaning gringos to get their priorities straight and not abandon their principles at the first chance for some little symbolic triumph. When someone who is essentially a propaganda mouthpiece for the Bush administration can be sent to jail over something like this, imagine what this could mean for true authentic journalists trying to uncover the CIA’s dirty work. Fortunately, my impression is that the actual jailing of a journalist has snapped a lot of liberals out of their Rove-lynching daze, but apparently some still don’t get it.
I was too harsh on Randi Rhodes
Submitted on July 21st, 2005 by Sean DonahueRhodes has been out there on the airwaves for months talking about the CIA torture scandal, about the war, and about John Negroponte's dark history with the Honduran death squads.
I think she's taking the wrong position and the wrong angle on this issue, but she definitely is no apologist for the CIA.
That said, there definitely are a lot of liberals, including many in Congress and a lot of pundits who are praising and defending the CIA, and that is frightening and dangerous to me. The enemies of our enemies are not necessarily our friends. And I think that while we should be pressing for Rove and his buddies to be indicted as accessories to war crimes, we need to oppose Rove's prossecution for outing Valerie Plame, because the law he is accused of breaking is a bad law designed to protect the secrecy of a fundamentaly evil agency.