Cross-posted at My Left Wing
Former NSC staffer Roger Morris, who quit (along with Anthony Lake) in protest of Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia, has a new article, “The Source Beyond Rove: Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal.” It’s a long article, the great bulk of which is in the form a timeline.
With one exception, what’s damning is not so much any one particular fact, but the whole pattern of Rice’s involvement–precisely the sort of thing that National Security analysts (current or former) and prosecutors are specifically trained to spot, track down, and turn inside-out. In an interview on KPFK this afternoon, Morris suggested that Fitzgerald may well have Rice in his sights as well as Rove.
I’ll quote the passage dealing with that exception below the fold….
Before citing the most damning evidence of Rice’s complicity, it needs to be placed in context.
The core statement of Morris’s perspective is as followes:
For those who know the invariably central role of the NSC Advisor in sensitive political subjects in foreign policy and in White House leaks to the media as well as tending of policy, especially in George W. Bush’s rigidly disciplined, relentlessly political regime, Rice by both commission and omission was integral in perpetrating the original fraud of Niger, and then inevitably in the vengeful betrayal of Plame’s identity. None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval, and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with her scripting….
Her manifest failures in the fateful months before 9/11 in meeting the principal responsibilities of the National Security Advisor-the sheer incompetence and shallowness that left so much intelligence uncoordinated, so much neglected or misunderstood-should have been enough to have run her from public office long ago, of course, were it not for her hold on this tragically flawed president, and her deplorable immunity amid the chronic political cowardice of both the Democrats and the media.
Now, however, her role in the Plame scandal cannot be ignored or excused. She alone among senior officials was knowing and complicitous at every successive stage of the great half-baked yellow cake fraud. She alone was the White House peer-and in national security matters the superior-to Rove and Libby, who never could have acted without her collusion in peddling Plame’s identity. She as much as anyone had a stake in smearing Wilson by any and all means at hand. If Rove and Libby are to be held criminally or at least politically accountable for a breach of national security, our “mushroom cloud” secretary of state should certainly be in the dock with them.
That said, here is the crucial part of the timeline in which Rice’s role in the outing itself is most exposed:
It is in these hours of late July 7 and early July 8 that Rove, Libby and other officials get word of Plame’s identity from Air Force One. Rove and Libby will hear of Plame in the drafting with Tenet of his mea culpa, but officials on the plane reading the INR memo cannot know or be sure of this, and the memo’s passages on Wilson, including his wife, are now relayed back to Washington. Reporters later speculate that Powell might have called either Rove or Libby with such information, but as one concludes aptly, “That was above his pay grade.” The President himself might have read the memo and called the two aides. But given Bush’s style and grasp, that, too, is implausible, though he may well have been informed of the calls and given his approval. The only official on board Air Force One with the knowledge and authority-motive, means and opportunity-to instruct Rove and Libby and so betray Plame was Condoleezza Rice.
Ultimately, of course, the one responsible is Bush, and the underlying crime is the lying to Congress and leading the country to war under false pretenses, as John Bonifaz has explicitly detailed in his May 22, 2005 Memo to Congressmember John Conyers, Jr.:
If the evidence revealed by the Downing Street Memo is true, then the President’s submission of his March 18, 2003 letter and report to the United States Congress would violate federal criminal law, including: the federal anti-conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. – 371, which makes it a felony “to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose…”; and The False Statements Accountability Act of 1996, 18 U.S.C. – 1001, which makes it a felony to issue knowingly and willfully false statements to the United States Congress.
As can be seen from Morris’s timeline, Rice, among others, could also plausibly be indicted as a co-concpirator along with Bush in the violation of those laws.