Time to fall on sword
The allegation that White House officials went journalist shopping to sell a story that cuts into the credibility of a critic of the war on Iraq is rather routine. Isn’t it the job of the political spinners to plant seeds of “information” with the aim of making their bosses look better in the public eye? The troubling part about the current flap centering on a July column written by columnist Robert Novak is that this wasn’t any ordinary spin. The identity of a CIA operative was disclosed in violation of federal law. The FBI and counterespionage attorneys at Justice should be permitted to pursue the charge without the interference of politics. It began when former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson wrote in a July 6 New York Times commentary that he had traveled to Niger in 2002, at the request of the Bush administration, to investigate allegations of uranium sales to Iraq.
He found the allegations were not credible and wrote that intelligence was “twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”
Novak’s column, that in part questioned why Wilson was picked for the Niger’s assignment, said Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative. That information, he wrote, came from senior White House officials.
The story has grown legs with allegations that these senior officials might include Bush’s top political advisor Karl Rove and that a half-dozen other journalists turned down the story before Novak bit.
Through his syndicated column, the Chicago-Sun Times columnist wrote, “To protect my own integrity and credibility, I would like to stress three points. First, I did not receive a planned leak. Second, the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson’s wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else. Third, it was not much of a secret.”
No doubt that this is the ammunition of political scandals. The Democrats are screaming for an independent counsel, questioning the close ties between Justice and the White House. But an independent counsel that could needlessly drag this out should only be employed if it appears Justice isn’t up to the task.
The quickest way to put this to rest is for those senior officials to step forward and leak their own identities.