7-12-05, 8:05 am
'Turd blossom,' President Bush’s pet name for his pudgy friend and the brains of the Bush operation, Karl Rove, should resign and go to jail.
Unfortunately, if Rove’s resignation and/or imprisonment comes to pass, it won’t be because Rove engineered the anti-democratic vote theft in 2004, the viciousness of his orchestrated attacks on the US free media, or even the secrecy he has enclosed the White House in deceiving the US public about various policy issues from the illegal war in Iraq, torture, to the corporate-written energy policy, and so on.
It will be because Rove exposed a CIA agent.
A Newsweek story over the weekend revealed that Rove had indeed leaked the identity of Valerie Plame, CIA agent and wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson to members of the press. It is a crime for a person in the government to willfully leak a CIA agent’s identity.
Even worse, Rove did so in order to try to discredit and retaliate against Wilson, who had traveled to Niger and debunked evidence the administration claimed proved that Iraq was trying to make nuclear weapons. The administration’s evidence was a forgery and wasn’t even a good one.
Rove and Company regarded Wilson’s mission as a challenge to the administration’s momentum to war against Iraq.
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think the CIA is a venerable institution. At the risk of harassment, I’d suggest it is an organization of thugs, coup plotters, and anti-democratic agents of US imperialism. I have very little sympathy for outting an agent.
While the big media has turned this story into one of a struggle over the free press and its right to keep sources confidential in order to protect them and the truth, I’d say after three years of coddling Rove and Bush on important stories like Iraq, energy policy, election irregularities, corruption and so on, the press’ self-important claim now of being the last bastion of freedom, is a bit ironic.
What about our freedom from a war based on lies? Our freedom from an administration so thoroughly embedded in the corporate agenda that one wonders where Halliburton ends and the Oval Office begins?
The media’s role is to fight for the truth. Not just when it’s convenient or some good publicity is on the offing. The failure to fight for the truth over the Iraq war and the administration’s rationale for it cost the lives of 1,800 US troops and 25,000 Iraqis at least.
This great crime is in part the responsibility of the media. Take an example: if the media wants to it can turn the minor mistake of a 'runaway bride' into the story of the decade, but when the administration lies about Iraq’s attempt to purchase nuclear materials...
Why didn’t the media make Wilson’s mission to Niger and the subsequent revelation that forged documents were being used to make a case for war into the crime of the decade?
As to Rove, he deserves a great deal of retribution, but if the law will only smack his wrist for tattling on CIA types, we’ll take it. For now.
But the story shouldn’t end with Rove or Bush’s other fall guy, Scott McClellan. There needs to be an investigation into the extent to which Rove’s move was discussed or planned in the White House and by whom.
For the future, we will have to fight for a real media and a just and peaceful foreign policy, and that justice be brought to those who commit crimes of terror and war.
