http://hardblogger.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/07/05/259309.aspx
'CIA leak saga': An intramural struggle within the U.S. government over Iraq
Posted: Thursday, July 05, 2007 5:06 PM by Hardball
Chris Matthews
The president’s decision to commute Scooter Libby’s prison sentence
gives us a chance to look at this whole “CIA leak saga” for what it is:
an intramural struggle within the U.S. government over the Iraq war.
That struggle pitted the career officers in the CIA, who opposed sending
the American army into Iraq against the White House hawks centered in
the vice president’s office who had set their hearts on taking out
Saddam Hussein.
The first round in this struggle clearly went to Vice President Cheney
and his chief of staff Scooter Libby. In the fall of 2002, Cheney made
the toughest possible case for war: that the failure to topple Saddam
Hussein would lay our country open to a nuclear attack from Iraq. Vice
President Cheney made this case repeatedly on national television.
President Bush backed up Cheney’s warnings of Saddam’s nuclear potential
in his 2003 State of the Union address when he spoke directly of efforts
by Saddam to purchase nuclear materials from the African government of
Niger.
With those dire warnings of a nuclear attack on us from Iraq, America
went to war. The hawks had won; the skeptics in the CIA had lost. Their
boss, CIA director George Tenet had backed up Secretary of State Colin
Powell’s claims at the United Nations that Iraq did, in fact, pose a
strategic threat to the world.
Now came round two: the Blame Game.
When American forces couldn’t find nuclear weapons or other stockpiles
of so-called “WMD” in Iraq, both sides in the pre-war debate scrambled
for advantage.
First came a fusillade of news articles in the Washington Post, clearly
derived from intelligence sources, which showed the Bush White House had
vastly oversold the Saddam threat. Among the leaked info was the charge
that the Bush people had knowingly pushed an account of a Saddam effort
to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger which they knew to be untrue. The
most pointed charge was that the vice president’s office had pushed the
nuclear case for war knowing it could not be substantiated, knowing that
that a CIA inquiry into the supposed Iraq-Niger deal made at Cheney’s
own request had come up dry. The envoy who’d been sent to Niger to check
out the possible Saddam deal, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, himself
wrote a New York Times column saying just that.
Then, in a manner still murky, columnist Robert Novak wrote a column
identifying Ambassador Wilson’s wife as a CIA operative, a fact he’d
gotten from Richard Armitage, the number-two man at the State
Department, then had confirmed by White House political ramrod Karl
Rove. Later, it came out that Cheney aide Libby had himself been
peddling the story that Wilson was only involved in the matter because
his wife Valerie was with the CIA, an agency engaged in a hot struggle
with the Bush White House over who deserved the blame for the bad
pre-war Iraq intell. In their eyes, she “was” the CIA, in other words,
the other side in this intramural blame game.
Looking at this fight before, during and after, the rules of engagement
become clear. Both sides decided it was in their interest to leak. The
CIA people went out and leaked all they could following the invasion -
and the failure to find WMD - about how the hawks in the White House,
especially in Cheney’s office, had pushed the intell far beyond its
worth in order to sell the war. Watching the CIA people - and Valerie
Plame’s husband - pushing the CIA version of events, the Bush people -
Rove and Libby - recognized who their enemy was: the careerists at the
Central Intelligence Agency who hated the Bush policy of invading Iraq.
But round two went to the CIA. Scooter Libby got convicted and sent to
hard time in prison. For kicking dirt in the prosecutor’s face, and
preventing him from discovering what really happened in the CIA leak
matter, Cheney’s chief of staff was declared a felon, Cheney himself
left under what prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald called a “cloud” of suspicion.
Round Three: the president terminates Libby’s sentence and leaves a
cloud over himself.
