Richard Cohen opens his eyes
p6: I have to do the whole editorial because Mr. Cohen just nails the whole hypocrisy thing.
By Richard Cohen
Thursday, October 2, 2003; Page A23
A government that cannot catch Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein is probably not going to catch the person who leaked the name of a CIA agent. The Washington leaker, a poltergeist with a phone, is sometimes good and sometimes bad but is almost never caught. He or she disappears into the Washington souk, an exotic marketplace where information is traded, character is assassinated and the air is redolent with hypocrisy.
That hypocrisy was on display Tuesday when President Bush indignantly declared war on leaking, asserting that there are "just too many leaks." The president, as is his wont, misspoke. What he meant to condemn are leaks that do damage to his administration. Up to now, he has said nothing about leaks that favor his cause.The leak now under investigation is of a particularly pernicious kind. The identity of the CIA employee was disclosed not really to inform the public of something it should know, but as a way to send a dead fish to anyone in the administration who might question that Iraq was a major and imminent menace. Saddam Hussein, we were once told, not only had chemical and biological weapons but was rushing to build an atomic bomb. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said Condi Rice.
Within the intelligence community, remarks such as Rice's caused a certain amount of head-snapping. The president's national security adviser waxed mushroomish the same day in September 2002 that the New York Times reported Iraq had "sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes" for its nuclear weapons program. The Times story cited "administration officials," "American officials" and the conclusions of "American intelligence experts."
The Times story was clearly based on a lot of reporting -- and just as clearly, government officials cooperated. They did so because the story suited the purposes of the Bush administration -- never mind that they led the Times astray. The tubes are now thought to have been designed for a conventional weapons program -- missiles.
For some reason the Bush administration did not denounce that sort of leak. On the contrary, Rice, Cheney and others used the story in their Sunday talk show appearances. This was typical. The administration has leaked or used intelligence over and over again to make the case for a war in Iraq. However, it would not permit dissenting views to surface.
One such dissenter was Joseph C. Wilson IV, a veteran diplomat who had been dispatched by the CIA to Niger to check on reports that Iraq had been trying to buy "yellowcake" uranium there. Wilson found no such effort, but -- in what we can now see was a familiar pattern -- his report was brushed aside. Bush cited the uranium in his State of the Union address.
After Walter Pincus of The Post reported on Wilson's Africa trip, Wilson himself went public in a New York Times op-ed essay. That was July 6. On July 14, Robert Novak identified Wilson's wife by name as a CIA "operative." She had been instrumental in sending Wilson to Africa, Novak wrote.
Maybe so. And if so, that's moderately interesting. But much more interesting is the fact that yet another leaker -- this one identified as a senior official -- told The Post that Valerie Plame's name was leaked "purely and simply for revenge." The Post noted that it is "rare for one Bush administration official to turn on another," which indeed it is. This leaker is now the one who needs protection. We have a latter-day Deep Throat.
The leaking of Plame's name, Nixonian in its malevolence, ought to cost Novak his University of Maryland basketball tickets and a self-flagellating column about what he would have written had a liberal columnist done something similar. Other conservative columnists, particularly those who knotted the noose after every Clinton administration boo-boo, ought to write similar columns of penance. I look forward to such delicious reading -- and their calls for a special prosecutor. (I suggest Bill Clinton.)
The president's umbrage at leaks may be sincere, but then how would he know? He merely scans the papers -- sports, presumably. As for others in his administration, their hypocrisy would threaten their immortal soul, if they had one. The fog of cant and sanctimony is so thick I fear that this time a leaker might be caught. Rest assured, it will not be the button man who put a hit on Wilson and his wife but the one who blew the whistle. White House security is at fault.
Somehow, someone got in with a conscience.
