HANDS
OFF BOB NOVAK!
THE REAL CRIMINALS ARE IN THE WHITE HOUSE
By: Justin Raimondo
The idea that, because of the Plame
Affair, conservative columnist Bob Novak may be called on to reveal his sources –
perhaps even be subpoenaed
– leads to an interesting question: Did the leaker (or leakers) hope to ensnare Novak
in a legal and ethical
web – and discredit him as a reporter – when they chose him as the conduit of
their calumny?
It makes sense because Novak, aside from his partisan leanings, was an acerbic opponent
of the Iraq war, and a thorn in the side of the neocons. Neocon David Frum,
Bush's ex-speechwriter and co-author of the infamous "axis of evil" meme, denounced
Novak in a long screed
excommunicating antiwar conservatives from the Respectable Right: Frum took special care
to smear Novak as especially guilty of "anti-Semitism" (never mind that Novak is
of Jewish heritage: logic never once entered into Commissar Frum's feverish
invective). |
The only problem with this theory is that, in outing a CIA undercover
operative, the leakers also drew attention to themselves – but that is not
necessarily a fatal error. An investigation of some sort into how and why we were lied
into war was in
the works, anyway. By narrowing the scope of such an inquiry, the leakers were making
the best of a bad situation. And they may not have much to worry about anyway….
The President has already ruled out the
three top suspects in this case: Karl Rove, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Elliot Abrams. Rove
is widely
quoted as saying to MSNBC correspondent Chris Matthews that Valerie Plame Wilson was
"fair game," and the other two have a storied
history of scandal
approached by few other denizens of Washington. Furthermore, amid all the stories
detailing yesterday's "deadline"
for government personnel to turn over records pertaining to contacts with Novak – and
at least half a dozen other
reporters in the Washington press corps who had the Plame story peddled to them –
there is very little mention of a key factor: the documents are being turned over
to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, rather than to the Justice Department
directly. Is there any doubt that they will be vetted – in the name of "national
security" – and sanitized before being turned over? It should be no problem
digging up the pertinent
paragraphs in the "Patriot" Act to legalize the cover-up.
As we head into a presidential election year, the Wilson-Plame scandal is inevitably
framed in partisan terms, and is thus much easier to dismiss as "gotcha"
politics. This tends to narrow the scope of the investigation even further. With White
House wagons circling, the first real consequence of this controversy is to make Novak the
target of a smear campaign
– and perhaps even prosecution.
Let's get one thing clear: Novak committed no crime. He merely reported one. The
criminals are the "senior administration officials" who whispered secrets in his
ear with the knowledge that they would almost certainly see print. To all those supposedly
"antiwar" Republican-haters,
who write Novak off as a shill for the Bush administration: without Novak's reporting, the
machinations of the neocons would still be taking place in the dark. His column shone the
spotlight on their intrigues, and in no way did he denigrate or dismiss Joe Wilson. As Jack Shafer put it in Slate:
"Whatever the leakers' objective, Novak did not serve them very well. I defy
anyone to read Novak's now-famous
column and summarize it coherently. The brief discussion of Plame and her shadowy
occupation seems gratuitous in the larger frame of the article, which, if anything,
sympathizes with Wilson's view that the case for war wasn't properly made."
The
neocons hate Bob Novak. It's true he has been the recipient of
a lot of neocon-inspired leaks over the years, as Dana Milbank pointed out recently in
the Washington Post, but that was back in the cold war era, when the distinctions between neos and traditional
conservatives mattered much less. Novak was content to play ball with them on the
question of perceived weakness in the face of the Soviet threat. Once that threat ended,
however, the alliance was sundered. Novak opposed Gulf War I, as well as the conquest of
Iraq, and gives important visibility to the conservative anti-interventionist position.
The neocons will never forgive him for writing that the Iraq war was "Sharon's war."
Just as the neoconservative network inside this administration handed the President a
booby-trapped bit of "intelligence" that wound up being based on a forgery, so
they handed Novak a ticking time-bomb of a story, one set to go off with the starting gun
of the race for the White House.
If their minions in the administration are facing an investigation that could discredit
them, then the neocons might as well take one of their enemies down with them. If the
President and even Donald Rumsfeld
are having second thoughts
about the grandiose plans of the neocons, who want to "transform"
the entire Middle East – through war, of course – then why not take down the
Bushies, too? It's like that scene in The
Lord of the Rings when Gandalf is
facing off the Balrog. The monstrous creature is shoved into a bottomless pit –
but a tentacle of the vanquished monster grips the wizard's ankle in a final burst of
malevolent energy, dragging Gandalf down into the
abyss.
Various legal analyses of the
circumstances of this case tend to downplay the possibility of Novak being in legal
trouble, but I wouldn't rule it out just yet. Law professor and blogger extraordinaire
Glenn
Reynolds would drag Novak into court, and presumably jail him for refusing to divulge
his sources. Witless
lefties of Pavlovian
tendencies are also calling for Novak's scalp, ignorantly reacting in typically knee-jerk
fashion, because they are just too stupid to see what the neocons are up to.
Former CIA agent Larry Johnson
tore into Novak on MSNBC the other day: Johnson holds him responsible for whatever
collateral damage Plame's unmasking entails. Everyone she ever dealt with, was seen
talking with, etc., is now, Johnson explained, "outed" along with Mrs. Wilson.
But it is absurd to hold Novak responsible for that, since a) he was told that she worked
as an analyst, not an undercover agent, and 2) when he told them he was going to print her
name, none of his CIA sources raised much of a ruckus.
The neoconservative network that
fed a President hungry for misinformation, and lied the nation into war, is under
attack from all sides. Even some Republicans in Congress are up in arms about the costs,
and projected length of our stay in Iraq. The neocons may be cornered, but they are
fighting back all the more viciously because of it. That is why they outed an undercover
CIA officer: on the theory that the best defense is a good offense, they are taking out
their enemies – the antiwar conservatives, Joe Wilson, Novak, and whoever's next
– picking them off one by one. As Stuart Taylor, Jr., legal affairs writer for The
Atlantic, points
out:
"The most relevant Supreme Court precedents suggest that the courts would
probably reject claims that reporters have an absolute First Amendment right to protect
their sources. The most obvious target for a subpoena would be conservative columnist
Robert D. Novak, who in July identified Valerie Plame, wife of former Ambassador Joseph C.
Wilson IV, as a CIA "operative on weapons of mass destruction," citing "two
senior administration officials" as his sources."
By dragging the media into court, and putting them on trial, in effect, the
cornered rats in this administration may yet be able to turn the tables. The spectacle of
Novak or any of the other six or so Washington reporters being threatened with
prosecution, while the White House exonerates the prime suspects in advance, will signal
that the rats have triumphed, again.
Justin Raimondo is Editorial Director
of AntiWar.Com.
He is a regular columnist for Ether Zone.
Justin Raimondo may be contacted at egarris@antiwar.com
Published in the October 8, 2003 issue of Ether Zone
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