Addendum to Plame Games

I think I was a little unclear in my previous post about the political wing's (i.e. Bush, Rove, and the White House Iraq Group) motivation for leaking Plame's name to reporters. The fact that Joseph Wilson went public with his criticism of the Bush team for including bogus reports of Iraq attempting to purchase uranium from Niger provided cover for this team, along with Libby, to start talking to reporters about him. Now that he's gone public, they could say, on double-deep-super-duper-background, that he was recommended for the job by his wife, Valerie Plame-- the plausible deniability being in the fact that Wilson went public. Now they could say that they were trying to set the record straight. Oh, she's covert? We didn't know that. And we never mentioned her by name. We just said Wilson's wife recommended him for the job.

She was the target. And this goes a long way towards explaining why Joe Wilson was so very pissed off about the whole thing. But what he has been so pissed off about is classified, so he's had to limit his counter-punching to the leaking itself. He can't very well say that his wife's non-official cover operation for the CIA has been utterly compromised. If he were to do that, then he would now be under investigation for spilling some classified beans. Furthermore, this guy is a true-blue American. He has now been super-duper double-crossed. His wife's lifework in the toilet due to an American government that behaves like Stalinists-- and the very fact that Stalinists are now running the country that he has served for all these decades.

Plame Games

It was late September of 2003 when I first became aware of the blogging phenomenon. I had never heard the word "blog" before then, so I made an educated guess as to what it meant: Web log. It was the Valerie Wilson story that had my interest piqued. You see, it was late September when the CIA made a referral to the Justice Department asking them to inquire as to whether any administration officials broke the law by leaking CIA OperativeValerie Wilson's (nee Plame) name to Robert Novak, who of course, outed her in a column he wrote in July of same year. So it was then, for the first time, that I saw the bogging wires in all of their superlinking glory tearing ass after the most oblique of sentences to parse, shredding to oblivion the most minor of Administration inconsistencies, suffering no apologias spewing forth from the gutless gullets of the news-spinning windbags, working themselves up into frightful fits over rovers, scooters, picklers, and tweeties-- and then coming back the next day to do it all over again. It really was a gas.

But it was in this story that I, as well as many other folk, identified a dangling thread upon which to yank with the hope of unraveling the whole tapestry of lies, deceits, crimes and misdemeanors that neatly swath this Administration's foreign policy apparatus. Herein lied the lighted way out of this fetid tunnel. It would make a good show for TV, I thought. It all started with a paltry act of political revenge to deligitimize a powerful Iraq war critic; only, as David Corn was the first to point out (no time to find link), whoever committed this paltry act of political vengence just may have broken the law. And, as they used to say before Iran/Contra, no one is above the law. And now, two years later, with Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury set to expire on the 28th, it's looking more and more likely that these creeps may yet be brought to answer for their actions.

Yet, until today, I have held onto a couple of reservations that have nagged at me throughout these two years. Firstly, the act itself isn't one that would generally bother me much-- that is, unless my wife were the CIA operative. No, I've read too much about the CIA's secret wars and black deeds to really care if an operative is outed. Good, I might think. One less spook fucking the world up in the name of manifest US dominance. For me, it was always just getting these bastards one way or another. If they broke the law-- even if I don't believe in the law-- fuck 'em. Let Rove be frog-marched out of the white house, as Ambassador Wilson once famously (and publicly) wished. Having said this, it has been fairly well demonstrated, and indeed made to stand out in high relief due to this very scandal, that it was the CIA, as well as the State Department's intelligence service, that was acting at least as some sort of buffer against the blind, hotheaded fury of the geopolitical jihadists in the Vice President's office hell-bent on taking Saddam out-- or, more accurately, taking Iraq in.

Secondly-- and this is the one that I shared with a lot of pooh-poohing right-wingers-- despite my wanting to believe the eloquent attempts by Digby (no time to find links) and others to try to paint this as just one of many political hatchet jobs orchestrated by Karl Rove, I just didn't see it as a very damaging smear campaign against Wilson. So what if they claim that his wife, Valerie, suggested him for his trip to Niger? I would ask. How does this discredit him? This doesn't sound all that Rovian to me. Swift Boats? Sure. Saying McCain had an illegitimate black child during the 2000 primaries? Sure. But this? I just didn't get it. The smear notion just doesn't compute as a plausible motive. And further, if this was the case, I didn't quite understand why Scooter Libby, who strikes me much more as a neocon neanderthal than cunning political assassin, would be getting his hands dirty in all this.

But today, as I was reading the comments to this post by firedoglake's Plame-obsessed Jane Hamsher, I had one of those moments that were I in a movie, say, The Usual Suspects, I would have dropped my coffee cup, a la Chazz Palminteri, with the realization that I had been talking to Keyser Soze for the last 100 minutes. As it was, I merely prolapsed my entrails. The commenter, Walt, posits this theory: Joe Wilson was not the target of the smear. Valerie Wilson, and her entire CIA operation, was the real target-- and not just of a smear, but a full-on rat-fucking.

Here's what Walt says (I don't know how to link to HaloScan. Sorry, Walt)

Even before Mr. Wilson went public, his wife, her Brewster-Jennings operation, and the CIA task force on weapons were the "entrenched" CIA problems for Vice-president Cheney's attempts to fabricate (fabulize) various tales about Iraq. Valerie (Plame) Wilson & her division of the CIA (I think described as counter proliferation) were a constant, continual & cantankerous pain in the ass for the cabal of neo-cons.

***********************************************************

Taking this approach, that the actual object of the smear campaign was to put Brewster-Jennings totally out of operation, explains many of the functions without having to creat incredible, implausible levels of complexity. Novak made clear that he was "given" the Plame name. He was given the name of the cover company. He was given the weapons of mass destruction tasking information.

I had heard something like this theory a long time ago, but I dismissed it then as poppycock. Now that I've learned a lot more about this case, and Judy Miller's involvement in it (read firedoglake for background), I'm not so sure that this doesn't really tie up some things. If one views the administration, as I do, as a sort of bicameral operation, with Cheney and Libby in the policy wing and Bush and Rove in the political wing, then "taking this approach" becomes very informative. "Taking this approach" also makes clear that a very serious crime was committed.

For instance, when Matt Cooper and Judy Miller were appealing a lower court's decision to find them in contempt, one of the appelate judges, a Judge Tatel "wrote a 41-page opinion in which he seemed eager to make new law -- a federal reporters’ shield law -- but in the end, he couldn’t bring himself to do it in this particular case. In his final paragraph, he says he 'might have' let Cooper and Miller off the hook '[w]ere the leak at issue in this case less harmful to national security.'"* Apparently, there were eight redacted pages in Tatel's 41-page opinion pertaining to classified information. Apparently, they were of grave importance to national security.

So, the scene is set. We have Scooter and Dick wanting to take out Valerie Wilson's CIA operation. We have W. and Turdblossom wringing their hands because her husband has just written an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times criticizing the inclusion of the bogus Niger claims in Bush's State of the Union address. Sounds like a twofer. Let's make some calls. If shit hits fan, plausible deniability becomes our mantra. "We were just setting the record straight on the Niger issue." "I never used her name." "Blah, blah, blah."

It's important to remember that John Ashcroft was head of Justice at this time, and he was leading the investigation himself. These guys, I'm sure, were counting on a whitewash. But something happened in Justice, and Ashcroft recused himself. Then they got this pit-fighter Fitzgerald to run the investigation. Shit hit fan.

The attack on Joseph Wilson is tied up with the one on his wife: By outing her, and her whole operation, they have destroyed her career, not to mention decimated an extremely important enclave concerning national security, namely, a CIA operation dealing with counterproliferation vis-a-vis Iraq. And they've removed a powerful obstacle standing in the way of their running roughshod over everything. It's not a smear. It's a fucking war! It's the act of naming her-- an undercover CIA operative-- that is the attack. That's gotta hit a nerve. His wife is fucked, and the country is run by a group of thugs. Endgame.

* The Huffington Post Laurence O'Donnell, 07.07.05

A Movie Review

If you haven't seen A History of Violence, you shouldn't read this.

I heard David Cronenberg being interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air the other day, so I knew going into the movie that I would see two sex scenes-- one in which Maria Bello wears a cheerleading outfit, and one in which she and Viggo Mortensen do it violently on a wooden staircase-- before I set foot in the theater. What I didn't know, however, was that the first sex scene, the playful encounter, would exhibit the two players ensconced in a fantastic, though fleeting, fete of 69-- a rarity on the screen, even in porn. (As my longtime readers probably know, this is one of my favorite acts of sexual contortion.) The scene takes place in the first act of the film, setting up the house of cards, both in terms of mood and substance, that we would see getting obliterated through the remainder of the picture and complements nicely the darker, more desperate scene on the stairs that occurs at the beginning (by my reckoning) of the third and final act at a moment when the truth has been laid bare and sides have been chosen. These scenes-- the before and after-- are fundamental to the movie's thematic exploration of our primal impulses, most poignantly demonstrated through the nexus of sex and violence.

These are Americans-- a married couple, happy parents of a teenage son and young daughter, owners of a local diner-- who live in a nice house in a small town in one of the Red states (Indiana, I think). But these two were no high school sweethearts. No, it is for this reason-- that they didn't grow up together-- that Maria Bello's character dons the cheerleading outfit in an effort to act out a fantasy that they never had the opportunity to realize. It's a very passionate and believable scene between these longtime lovers-- the ease and comfort with which Maria Bello swoops around to gorge on Viggo's member attest to this-- and it succeeds marvelously in illuminating the facade of the American dream, with all of its dangling prudishnesses and civilities and niceties, when juxtaposed against the bottomless depths of the human heart: The prom queen in her iconic regalia giving the QB a BJ in the back of the Beemer. But our QB isn't who she thinks he is.

No, our QB will kill eight men (by my count) before we leave the theater. He will kill them because he has to. But he will do it efficiently, brutally, professionally. He will do it because he can do it. And he will enjoy it. He will break limbs, crush noses, and shoot brains. He will become a hero and then become hunted. He will kill his own brother. He will slap his son. He will become a man that he thought he had rid himself of in another life. He will be stabbed and shot. He will be saved by his son, who will now know himself what it is to kill a man. He will kill and he will be caught-- not by the bad guys, though, but by his family, their American dream now shattered. And ultimately they will forgive him. They will forgive him for he is too who she thinks he is.

I've been irritated by Viggo Mortensen in the past, notably by his performance in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He was often flat, too understated, I thought, and I was irritated by his constant expression of quiet awe. The fact that he was once married to Exene Cervenkova did little to turn me around on the guy. This film allows him to show off a fuller range of his acting skills, though, and he excels in the part. He pulls off a nice shift as his Tom character morphs into undead Joey-- little things in the way he says words, a glint in the eye, a confidence in manner-- and he seems more than willing to let the big boys, Ed Harris and William Hurt, chew up the scenery around him. It is the very thing that previously irritated me-- his inscrutability-- that serves him well playing a man who is caught in an existential crisis relating to who he really is. Though in the end he is redeemed and forgiven, what devils, now lurking in some Freudian nether region, will yet come to visit?