The Leak Takes On Water

With more information being uncovered practically by the hour, and the ever-shifting story from the Bushies, as well as Turd Blossom's lawyers, it becomes difficult to accurately chronicle all the goings-on of Rovegate (or Plamegate, if you prefer; as long as it has a -gate suffix). Trying to keep it all straight practically makes your head explode.

So let's take a look at a few of relevant articles from over the weekend, and see how the pieces start to fit together. First is this one:

After mentioning a CIA operative to a reporter, Bush confidant Karl Rove alerted the president's No. 2 security adviser about the interview and said he tried to steer the journalist away from allegations the operative's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.

The July 11, 2003, e-mail between Rove and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley is the first showing an intelligence official knew Rove had talked to Matthew Cooper just days before the Time magazine reporter wrote an article identifying Valerie Plame as a CIA officer.

"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Associated Press, recounting how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations.

So now Hadley may be in the loop. Hadley was part of the Feith-Cambone gang of morons that wanted to push the yellowcake bullshit as evidence for going to war, no matter how hinky that "evidence" looked under honest scrutiny.

Looks like Scooter Libby, Cheney's head lackey, may be in this up to his eyeballs. You know what they say -- never trust a grown man called "Scooter".
[emphasis mine]

The vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was a source along with the president's chief political adviser for a Time story that identified a CIA officer, the magazine reporter said Sunday, further countering White House claims that neither aide was involved in the leak.

In an effort to quell a chorus of calls to fire deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove, Republicans said that Rove originally learned about Valerie Plame's identity from the news media. That exonerates Rove, the Republican Party chairman said, and Democrats should apologize.

But it is not clear that it was a journalist who first revealed the information to Rove.

A lawyer familiar with Rove's grand jury testimony said Sunday that Rove learned about the CIA officer either from the of Time magazine, reporter Matt Cooper wrote that during his grand jury appearance last Wednesday, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald ''asked me several different ways if Rove had indicated how he had heard that Plame worked at the CIA.'' Cooper said Rove did not indicate how he had heard.

The White House's assurance in 2003 that Rove was not involved in the leak of the CIA officer's identity ''was a lie,'' said John Podesta, White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration. He said Rove's credibility ''is in shreds.''

Until last week, the White House had insisted for nearly two years that Libby and Rove had no connection to the leak. Plame's husband is Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, the top U.S. diplomat in Iraq at the start of the Persian Gulf War.

The low-key damage control coming out of the White House is a thing to behold. Clearly they are hoping to chain this puppy out in the back yard and not feed it, and hope that it'll starve to death on its own. Knowing this gang, there probably is an actual puppy involved somewhere along the line.

At any rate, don't be too surprised to see Bush unveil his extra-double-plus-good SCOTUS nomination. I'm guessing Abu Gonzalez, which means Bush will then probably elevate Judge Judy to Attorney General.

Pravda doorstop Howie Kurtz throws in his .015 euros on the subject:

White House senior adviser Karl Rove, after telling Time reporter Matthew Cooper in 2003 that the wife of an administration critic worked for the CIA, closed the conversation by noting "I've already said too much," Cooper said today in recounting his testimony before a federal grand jury.

While that comment appeared to indicate the sensitive nature of the conversation, which is now under scrutiny by a special prosecutor investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's name, Rove said nothing about Plame being a covert operative, according to Cooper. The conversation took place days after Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, accused the White House of twisting evidence on whether Iraq had been seeking weapons of mass destruction.

The point has never been whether Rove "knew" that Plame was covert or not, or even if she was covert or not. (By all accounts, not only was she covert for some time, she worked for a front company, Brewster-Jennings, which was investigating covert WMD proliferation.) All we have to do is look at the timing and the method on this. It just happened that Joseph Wilson was incensed that his firsthand report on the Niger yellowcake claim had been dropped down the memory hole because it didn't say what the administration wanted to hear. So Wilson goes public with his disavowal of such tactics, and Scooter and Turd Blossom get their disavowals and disparagements of Wilson ready. And despite them acting like they never heard of no report, it sure seems funny that all this came out just days after Wilson's op-ed piece was in the NY Times.

It's all just a huge coincidence, you see. Nobody here but us chickens.

The current Newsweek attempts to illuminate a bit more, concentrating mostly on Turd Blossom's general M.O.:

Soon enough, Rove had drawn a bead on Wilson. The diplomat was a Democrat who had worked on national-security issues in the Clinton administration; he had donated money to Al Gore in 2000. Now, Rove had heard, he was friendly with Sen. John Kerry. Wilson was trying to drag Cheney into the story for partisan reasons—to caricature him as the dark, secret taskmaster of the war. Cheney hadn't dispatched Wilson; the vice president hadn't had anything directly to do with it.

In the World According to Karl Rove, you take the offensive, and stay there. You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness, good and bad, Bush versus Saddam. You are loyal to a fault to your friends, merciless to your enemies. You keep your candidate's public rhetoric sunny and uplifting, finding others to do the attacking. You study the details, and learn more about your foes than they know about themselves. You use the jujitsu of media flow to flip the energy of your enemies against them. The Boss never discusses political mechanics in public. But in fact everything is political—and everyone is fair game.

That's basically the operative aspect of it in a nutshell. But is Rove's part in this just the tip of the proverbial iceberg? Frank Rich seems to think so:

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

So put aside Mr. Wilson's February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. It was Mr. Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time." The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on "Meet the Press," in three speeches in August and on "Meet the Press" yet again in September. Along the way the frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix.

By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But hardly had Mr. Bush done so than, offstage, out of view of us civilian spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson. In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department's caveat that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa," made public in a British dossier, were "highly dubious." A C.I.A. assessment, sent to the White House that month, determined that "the evidence is weak" and "the Africa story is overblown."

AS if this weren't enough, a State Department intelligence analyst questioned the legitimacy of some mysterious documents that had surfaced in Italy that fall and were supposed proof of the Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. In fact, they were blatant forgeries. When Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said as much publicly in the days just before "shock and awe," his announcement made none of the three evening newscasts. The administration's apocalyptic uranium rhetoric, sprinkled with mushroom clouds, had been hammered incessantly for more than five months by then - not merely in the State of the Union address - and could not be dislodged. As scenarios go, this one was about as subtle as "Independence Day" and just as unstoppable a crowd-pleaser.

Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.'s could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the "Never mind!" with which Gilda Radner's Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on "Saturday Night Live." The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost "in the bowels" of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.'s fault or that it didn't matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.

Until Fitzgerald finally unveils his indictments and such, it's all speculation. But going by how these guys have been operating, it's pretty decent speculation. They don't have any moral boundaries as such, when it comes to protecting against even legitimate attacks on their chronic mal-fee-ance and mismanagement.