The Most Important Criminal Case in American History

[Guest guest]

A

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 14:10:13 EDT

The Most Important Criminal Case in American History

 

 

The Most Important Criminal Case in American History

 

By James Moore

 

10/21/05 " Huffington Post " -- -- If special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald

delivers indictments of a few functionaries of the vice president’s

office or the White House, we are likely to have on our hands a

constitutional crisis. The evidence of widespread wrongdoing and

conspiracy is before every American with a cheap laptop and a cable

television subscription. And we do not have the same powers of

subpoena granted to Fitzgerald.

 

We know, however, based upon what we have read and seen and heard that

someone created fake documents related to Niger and Iraq and used them

as a false pretense to launch America into an invasion of Iraq. And

when a former diplomat made an honest effort to find out the facts, a

plan was hatched to both discredit and punish him by revealing the

identity of his undercover CIA agent wife.

 

Patrick Fitzgerald has before him the most important criminal case in

American history. Watergate, by comparison, was a random burglary in

an age of innocence. The investigator’s prosecutorial authority in

this present case is not constrained by any regulation. If he finds a

thread connecting the leak to something greater, Fitzgerald has the

legal power to follow it to the web in search of the spider. It seems

unlikely, then, that he would simply go after the leakers and the

people who sought to cover up the leak when it was merely a secondary

consequence of the much greater crime of forging evidence to foment

war. Fitzgerald did not earn his reputation as an Irish alligator by

going after the little guy. Presumably, he is trying to find evidence

that Karl Rove launched a covert operation to create the forged

documents and then conspired to out Valerie Plame when he learned the

fraud was being uncovered by Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph

Wilson. As much as this sounds like the plot of a John le Carre novel,

it also comports with the profile of the Karl Rove I have known,

watched, traveled with and written about for the past 25 years.

 

We may stand witness to a definitive American moment of democracy. The

son of a New York doorman probably has in his hands, in many ways, the

fate of the republic. Because far too many of us know and are aware of

the crimes committed by our government in our name, we are unlikely to

settle for a handful of minor indictments of bureaucrats. The last

thing most of us believe in is the rule of law. We do not trust our

government or the people we have elected but our constitution is still

very much alive and we choose to believe that destiny has placed

Patrick Fitzgerald at this time and this place in our history to save

us from the people we elected. If the law cannot get to the truth of

what has happened to the American people under the Bush

administration, then we all may begin to hear the early death rattles

of history’s greatest democracy.

 

Fortunately, there are good signs. Fitzgerald has reportedly asked for

a copy of the Italian government’s investigation into the break-in

of the Niger embassy in Rome and the source of the forged documents.

The blatantly fake papers, which purported to show that Saddam Hussein

had cut a deal to get yellowcake uranium from Niger, turned up after a

December 2001 meeting in Rome involving neo-con Michael Ledeen, Larry

Franklin, Harold Rhodes, and Niccolo Pollari, the head of Italy’s

intelligence agency SISMI, and Antonio Martino, the Italian defense

minister.

 

If Fitzgerald is examining the possibility that Ledeen was executing a

plan to help his friend Karl Rove build a case for invading Iraq?

Ledeen has long ties to Italian intelligence agency operatives and has

spanned the globe to bring the world the constant variety of what he

calls “creative destruction†to build democracies. He makes the

other neo-cons appear passive. He brought the Reagan administration

together with the Iranian arms dealer who dragged the country through

Iran-Contra and shares with his close friend Karl Rove a personal

obsession with Machiavelli. Ledeen, who is almost rabidly anti-Arab,

famously told the Washington Post that Karl Rove told him, “Any time

you have a good idea, tell me.â€

 

The federal grand jury has to at least consider whether Ledeen called

Rove with an idea to use his contacts with the Italian CIA to hatch a

plan to create the rationale for war. Ledeen told radio interviewer

Ian Masters and his producer Louis Vandenberg, “I have absolutely no

connection to the Niger documents, have never even seen them. I did

not work on them, never handled them, know virtually nothing about

them, don't think I ever wrote or said anything about the subject.â€

It is strictly coincidence then that some months after he and his

neo-con consorts and Italian intelligence officers met in Rome that

the Niger embassy was illegally entered and nothing was stolen other

than letterhead and seals. And equally coincident that forged papers

under those letterheads were slipped to Elisabetta Burba, a writer for

an Italian glossy owned by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime

minister, and a backer of the Bush invasion scheme. Unfortunately for

the pro-war neo-cons, even an Italian tabloid would not publish the

fake documents and turned them over to the CIA and US government in Rome.

 

The other American attendees at Ledeen’s Roman Holiday are also

worthy of scrutiny. Larry Franklin was recently arrested for leaking

classified US government information to the American Israel Public

Affairs Committee. Ledeen sprang quickly to his defense but Franklin

faces prosecution next year and is most probably cooperating with

prosecutor Fitzgerald. Harold Rhode, the other American actor in this

tragicomic affair, worked the Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the

Department of Defense for Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense

Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Characterized as a

“counter-intelligence shop,†OSP simply interpreted intelligence

in a manner that fit the need for evidence that Iraq had WMD. If the

CIA gathered data that said otherwise, OSP analyzed it differently or

ignored the facts and then reported to the vice president precisely

what he wanted to hear. Rhode also was the liaison between Ahmed

Chalabi, the convicted embezzler the Bush administration was using to

feed information to them and Judy Miller about the distortions and

lies required to fuel the rush to war.

 

No great extrapolation is necessary to assume that OSP, sitting inside

the CIA, got early word that Joseph Wilson was being dispatched to

Niger to investigate the sale of low-grade uranium to Iraq. Rhode

needed only to pick up the phone and call the vice president’s chief

of staff Scooter Libby, who would tell his boss and Karl Rove. How

hard is it for even Republicans to believe, at this point, that Rove

is capable of launching a plan to discredit Wilson and punish him by

exposing his wife? Rove and his boss were not simply in danger of

losing the prime cause for the war; they faced an even graver

political wound of being discovered as covert agents who defrauded the

government and the public.

 

I have seen the spawn of Rove’s tortured mind and watched a hundred

of his political scams unfold and I am confident I know how this one

played out. Rove might have brought it up with his fellow big brains

in the White House Iraq Group, a propaganda organization set up to

disseminate information supporting the war. There was likely a

consensus to move the plan to smack down Wilson out of the White

House. Rove always keeps a layer of operatives between himself and the

person he gets to pull the trigger. Libby was probably told to manage

it out of the VP’s office to protect the president because Karl

always takes care of his most prized assets. Libby then likely ordered

John Hannah and possibly David Wurmser to call the ever-friendly Judy

Miller at the New York Times and columnist Robert Novak to give them

Valerie Plame’s identity. Rove knew that Miller would call Libby of

Aspen for confirmation and his old friend Novak was certain to call

Rove who, as an unidentified senior White House official, would

confirm the identity on background only. Because Novak is a partisan

gunslinger, he wrote more quickly than Miller and when she saw the

firestorm his story created, she backed off and has since been trying

to cover for herself and Libby. Miller’s later claim that she cannot

remember who gave her the “Valerie Flame†name is as much

dissembling as Rove’s unconvincing argument that he “forgot†he

met with Time reporter Matt Cooper. Karl Rove can remember precinct

results from 19th century presidential elections. He neither forgets

nor forgives.

 

There you have it, Mr. Prosecutor. To quote an unreconstructed former

Republican presidential candidate, “You know it. I know it. And the

American people know it.†We expect you also to have sufficient

evidence to prove all of this. There are many of us who are on the

verge of losing faith in our democracy. We are convinced that there

are people within the highest ramparts of American government who are

willing to put our country at great risk to advance their

geo-political vision. We want our country back. And all we have left

is the power of the law. From what we know, you are the right man come

forth at the right time.

 

Prove to us we still live in a democracy and a nation of laws.

 

James Moore is an Emmy-winning former television news correspondent

and the co-author of the bestselling, Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made

George W. Bush Presidential. He has been writing and reporting from

Texas for the past 25 years on the rise of Rove and Bush and has

traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976. He is

currently writing a book on the long term consequences for America of

Bush and Rove policies, which will be published next year.

 

© 2005 The Huffington Post