E-Mail This Article to a Friend Rove and Libby The dragnet tightens around the White House gangsters

Karl Rove, President Bush’s Tweedle-dum, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice-President Cheney’s Tweedle-dee, are up to their porcine snouts in the barnyard effluent that is popularly known as the Valerie Plame affair.

Plame is the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who while on a government mission determined that Niger had not sold yellow-cake uranium to Saddam Hussein while the dictator was still in power. As far as the White House was concerned, it was bad enough that Wilson in his official report did not come up with the result that the war-happy Bush administration wanted. During the run-up to the presidential election, Wilson refined his findings and published the result in an opinion piece in the New York Times, thereby exposing the rationale for the Iraq war as the lie we now all know it to be.

To smear Wilson and damage his wife’s career, two administration officials leaked the news to right-wing columnist Robert Novak that Plame suggested hubby Wilson for the African-uranium investigation and that Plame herself was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For those of us who distrust or despise Bush, nothing short of his impeachment can compensate for the deadly Iraq war launched on the wings of lies. Still, it is marginally satisfying that the Plame investigation is not working out in quite the way the Bushies had hoped. If anything, the administration is on the run. If the witness list of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is any indication, at least 19 senior White House appointees attracted enough suspicion to be called before a grand jury. And Rove and Libby, two full-bore political gangsters, are the ones so far implicated and disgraced — that is if it’s possible for thugs to comprehend the meaning of the word disgrace.

It’s still unclear just who leaked to Novak. Rove targeted Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper and Libby zeroed in on the New York Times’ Judith Miller, who, perhaps more than any other journalist, is responsible for publicizing Bush’s lies about Saddam possessing weapons of mass destruction. Before the Plame affair is over, the Times is going to have a lot of ’splaining to do, as Ricky Ricardo would have put it, regarding Miller’s still very murky role in this sordid series of events.

What is coming into focus is that Fitzgerald is trying to determine whether Rove and/or Libby perjured themselves or obstructed justice. In Washington, the crime is never as bad as the cover-up. That, for political-tong members, should have been the lesson of Watergate. Rove and Libby either "forgot" or failed to tell Fitzgerald all they knew about the Plame leak.

The public most likely will have to wait until the end of the month, when Fitzgerald is expected to wrap up his work, to find out what they knew. Until then we will have to make do with the sweet dream of watching Rove or Libby — or both — do the perp walk. Unless they are indicted, don’t expect that prevaricating sack of cattle manure George "I’m a Texan" Bush to make good on his promise to punish the leakers with dismissal. When it suits Bush’s purpose, to leak is divine, to get caught ... well, that’s mighty inconvenient.

Putting aside the question of Novak’s involvement, most experts agree that what Rove and Libby tried to do was not a crime, at least as defined by the letter of the laws now on the books. It was, rather, what Patrick Buchanan, back in the days when he was a Nixon speechwriter, called "political hardball." Dirty perhaps, but cricket nonetheless.

If it could be taken in isolation, the Plame affair is small stuff compared with the truly unconstitutional behavior of Richard Nixon’s Watergate era and Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra affair. Funny how those strict-constructionist Republicans have a track record of subverting the very Constitution they claim to hold so dear. Bush, for all his pious blather about the sanctity of the Constitution during this season of Supreme Court appointments, showed no spiritual respect for the nation when, as commander in chief, he led us to war under a banner of lies.

In that numbing interval between the 9/11 attacks and Plame, when much of the nation lost its sentient bearings and slipped into to a sort of collective coma, Bush sought to fortify his dishonest position on Iraq by demonizing those who opposed him. Wilson was one of many and Plame just happened to be his wife. Rove and Libby were Bush’s goons.

Meanwhile, damage more lasting than any inflicted on Plame and Wilson may yet be done. As David Johnston in the New York Times and Jack Shafer in Slate have pointed out, if Fitzgerald indicts in the Plame case (other than for perjury or obstruction) it looks as if he will do so under the broad statute that outlaws espionage, rather than the more narrow and technical one which makes it a crime to identify an undercover agent.

As Shafer points out, the espionage law has been used only twice before in media cases. The most famous instance, involving leaks by Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo of the Pentagon Papers, was ultimately dropped. Since reporters who cover foreign and military affairs rely on government officials to tell them about things that are often — to one degree or another — classified, this could, in effect, lead to the criminalization of reporting in any meaningful way on national-security affairs.

Whatever damage is done to his administration and whatever damage is done to the public’s right to be informed about what its government is up to overseas, Bush may still emerge from the Plame affair with a smile on his face.