Former Aide Says Bush is Complicit in Plame Affair

Scott McClellan used to be the White House Press Secretary. As such, he was an insider to a great many decisions of the Bush administration. Like a lot of ex-big shots in Washington, he has a book coming out, his pension scheme. In his, though, he states that the President himself is guilty of a felony, and one wonders just how much longer Congress and the American people are prepared to look the other way.

The Plame Affair, as it has come to be known, focuses around Valerie Plame, a CIA undercover operative, and her husband Ambassador Joe Wilson, a man who knows west Africa better than most American governmental officials. He went to Niger to follow up on a report that Saddam Hussein of Iraq-Nam tried to buy uranium from that country. The White House had made this claim in a State of the Union Speech by Mr. Bush. Mr. Wilson reported that the purchase attempt never happened, undermining the argument the Busheviks made for their misguided war. The Wilsons claim that Mrs. Wilson's undercover identity was leaked to rightist reporter Bob Novak in retaliation.

Back in the Reagan years, communist sympathizers used to leak the names of CIA operatives in El Salvador, Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America to ruin their work with right wing death squads. Congress decided to make this a felony, and the law has been on the books ever since. The law is pretty straightforward. The leaker has to know that the CIA operative is undercover, and he has to be deliberate in his decision. An accidental leak is not a crime.

Mr. McClellan's book, which is due out in April, says he told the US and world press that Karl Rove, the president's brain, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president's hatchet man, were not involved in leaking Mrs. Wilson's name to the press. In his own words, Mr. McClellan says “There was one problem. It was not true. I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice-president, the president's chief of staff, and the president himself.”

For an administration so paranoid about US national security, this is an appalling and astonishing statement. “The president himself” destroyed a US intelligence officer's career and compromised each and every source she had nurtured during the course of her long career. The motive was clearly political and unacceptable. There are 426 more days in the Bush administration. If Congress were truly interested in protecting the Constitution, obeying the laws of the land, and supporting the troops in trench coats as well as the ones in olive drab, it might do something to shorten that time.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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