"Retribution is their method. They go after the people they don't like. Wilson's a good example of it."

- Jay Rockefeller, Senate Intelligence Committee's ranking Democrat

Neocons are now part of the sordid history of CIA betrayal.

By: Jason Vest  

It's not news that many in the intelligence community aren't favorably disposed to the White House and its ideological adjuncts. But with the Washington Post confirming that someone high up in the Bush administration blew Valerie Plame's cover as a CIA covert operator - in apparent payback for Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, raining on the administration's Niger "yellowcake" parade - current and former intelligence officers are growing even more angry and incredulous.

"Monkeying with the analysis process for political purposes is one thing; bad as that is, it isn't anything new, and is almost predictable", says one retired intelligence official. "But our own people blowing the cover of one of our own people? And one of our people who's fighting the good fight?"

Indeed, the fact that Plame's assignment was one of those rare spooky endeavors that almost everyone agrees is laudable - nuclear-weapons counterproliferation - has prompted some in the intelligence community to allege that Bush's war on terrorism increasingly looks like a war on those actually fighting the war on terrorism...

By: Richard Cohen  

A government that cannot catch Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein is probably not going to catch the person who leaked the name of a CIA agent. The Washington leaker, a poltergeist with a phone, is sometimes good and sometimes bad but is almost never caught. He or she disappears into the Washington souk, an exotic marketplace where information is traded, character is assassinated, and the air is redolent with hypocrisy.

That hypocrisy was on display Tuesday when President Bush indignantly declared war on leaking, asserting that there are "just too many leaks". The President, as is his wont, misspoke. What he meant to condemn are leaks that do damage to his administration. Up to now, he has said nothing about leaks that favor his cause.

The leak now under investigation is of a particularly pernicious kind. The identity of the CIA employee was disclosed not really to inform the public of something it should know, but as a way to send a dead fish to anyone in the administration who might question that Iraq was a major and imminent menace...

"Start every day off with a smile and get it over with."

- W.C. Fields

"We need more human intelligence. That means we need more protection for the methods we use to gather intelligence and more protection for our sources, particularly our human sources, people that are risking their lives for their country. Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors."

- George H.W. Bush, April 16, 1999

By: Dick Meyer  

Fall guys, intimidation and leaked personal attacks on enemies are back in at the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. How Nixonian. How disappointing.

Political enemy number one is former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times on July 6 that infuriated the White House. Wilson reported that in 2002, at the CIA's request, he had investigated reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and that he had found the reports baseless. From that firsthand experience, Wilson wrote about the case for war in Iraq, "that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat".

Wilson's piece ignited a full-blown frenzy and led to an embarrassing White House admission that it shouldn't have included the discredited claim about "yellowcake" from Niger in his State of the Union address. The Texans didn't 'ppreciate that.

Action Alert

By: David Corn  

Pity McClellan. He has a tough task - to depict the President as caring about the leak even though he is doing nothing about it. The White House could well end up being ensnared in this scandal. The early signs are that there was indeed a plot to get Wilson (and destroy the career of his wife). The news reports indicate that some administration officials - perhaps only one or two - are upset about this and are willing to talk to reporters. If they're willing to talk to reporters, they might be willing to speak to prosecutors. The CIA must be committed to pushing the issue, otherwise it would not have requested an inquiry that places the White House in the crosshairs. Before this, the CIA and the White House had engaged in tense scuffling concerning the uranium-from-Niger controversy. But Tenet's request for an investigation was the bureaucratic equivalent of going nuclear. Now the Justice Department is in the spotlight. Will it go ahead with an investigation that threatens the White House? And will its decisions in this case be regarded as credible and not influenced by politics? Schumer says that he is rounding up more Democrats to join his call for a special counsel. In the meantime, McClellan will have to keep on dancing.

The facts are closing in on Bush and his crowd. And perhaps the law - that is, if Bush's comrades at the Justice Department are on the level. As Iraq continues to be a $170 billion headache, they have tied themselves to the mast of their prewar misrepresentations. As the Wilson leak threatens to become a primetime scandal, they are yielding no ground and hoping this inconvenience blows past. All in all, a precarious position for Bush. These are messes too severe to be straightened out by McClellan's heavy-handed, ludicrous spin.

By: Eric Lichtblau  

The government is using its expanded authority under the far-reaching law to investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies, and even corrupt foreign leaders, federal officials said.

Justice Department officials say they are simply using all the tools now available to them to pursue criminals - terrorists or otherwise. But critics of the administration's antiterrorism tactics assert that such use of the law is evidence the administration is using terrorism as a guise to pursue a broader law enforcement agenda.

The authorities have also used toughened penalties under the law to press charges against a lovesick 20-year-old woman from Orange County, CA, who planted threatening notes aboard a Hawaii-bound cruise ship she was traveling on with her family in May. The woman, who said she made the threats to try to return home to her boyfriend, was sentenced this week to two years in federal prison because of a provision in the Patriot Act on the threat of terrorism against mass transportation systems.

And officials said they had used their expanded authority to track private Internet communications in order to investigate a major drug distributor, a four-time killer, an identity thief, and a fugitive who fled on the eve of trial by using a fake passport.

By: Jim Lobe  

While Hurricane Isabel granted President George W. Bush a brief respite this week from the constant stream of bad news coming out of the Middle East, its ravages on Washington and the mid-Atlantic states might pale in comparison to the gathering political storm over his war in Iraq.

That storm is likely to gain even more force when the public has a chance to absorb this past week's events, which mostly slid under the media radar as Isabel approached the capital.

Particularly striking were signs of growing disarray at the highest levels of the administration, such as Bush's assertion that there was 'no evidence" linking Iraq to the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, a statement that appeared at odds both with what Vice President Dick Cheney claimed as recently as last Sunday and what he and some Pentagon officials had been advocating months before the war.

By: Eric Lichtblau and Richard W. Stevenson  

The White House today dismissed as "ridiculous" the suggestion that Karl Rove, senior adviser to President Bush, had illegally disclosed the identity of an undercover CIA officer, as the FBI opened an investigation into the case.

At the same time, the White House rejected growing calls from Democrats for the appointment of a special outside counsel to determine whether someone in the administration had disclosed the officer's identity in an effort to punish criticism of its Iraqi intelligence by the officer's husband.

Asked if there was a need for an independent counsel, Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said: "At this point, I think the Department of Justice would be the appropriate one to look into a matter like this."

"During the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush said he was against nation building, I didn't realize he meant only our nation."

- Al Franken

By: Richard L. Fricker  

I had this goofy idea: pretended none of this was happening and it would all go away. Wrong. Bush is still President and he is still lying. His goons and harlots are still roaming the streets in search of rubes willing to vote for anything as long as they can hate Bill Clinton, love Jesus, and kick Arab booty and beat up on their presumed lessers.

As anyone on the planet who has been reading or watching the news knows President Hide-Till-Its-Over now denies ever connecting Saddam Hussein with 9/11. Oh really?!!!

Let's see. No weapons of mass destruction ready to rain down on democracy in forty-five minutes, no Osama connection with Saddam, no bio-weapons, no U.N. resolution. Then what the hell was all this invasion business about and why are U.S. servicemen and women laying charred in the Iraqi dessert and why can't the Iraqis have their country back?

By: Paul Krugman  

It's official: the administration that once scorned nation-building now says that it's engaged in a modern version of the Marshall Plan. But Iraq isn't postwar Europe, and George W. Bush definitely isn't Harry Truman. Indeed, while Truman led this country in what Churchill called the "most unsordid act in history", the stories about Iraqi reconstruction keep getting more sordid. And the sordidness isn't, as some would have you believe, a minor blemish on an otherwise noble enterprise.

Cronyism is an important factor in our Iraqi debacle. It's not just that reconstruction is much more expensive than it should be. The really important thing is that cronyism is warping policy: by treating contracts as prizes to be handed to their friends, administration officials are delaying Iraq's recovery, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

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