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Joseph Wilson's RevengeWhy no special prosecutor for the latest CIA leak case?

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, April 24, 2006, at 1:31 PM ET

If Mary O. McCarthy should ever be so desperate as to need a character witness, or to require one so badly that she must stoop to my level, I declare in advance that I shall step forward pro bono. I am quite willing to accept that whatever she did or did not do or say about the surreptitious incarceration of al-Qaida suspects overseas (and let's not prejudge this), she did it from the most exalted motives.

I accept this because, however much of her hard-earned money she threw away on making a donation to the John Kerry presidential campaign, she is obviously more than a mere partisan. Back in 1998, she wrote a formal memo to President Clinton about his decision to bomb the Al-Shifa factory outside Sudan's capital of Khartoum. I wrote a slew of articles at the time to prove that this wild Clintonian action was wag-the-doggery, pure and simple. (You can look it up if you like in my book No One Left To Lie To.) At that time, I interviewed a number of CIA people, both on and off the record, and came to the conclusion that it was the wrong factory in the wrong place and had been blitzed mainly because of Clinton's difficulties with Monica Lewinsky. The clincher was the direct plagiarism of his own hysterical speech of justification from the glib speech delivered by Michael Douglas, trying to de-knicker Annette Bening in the mediocre film The American President. If George Bush had even tried to pull anything like this, he would have been impeached by now, or so I hope.

Several senior CIA officials, and people in other departments, also let their dissent be known. I might instance Jack Downing, head of the agency's directorate of operations as well as the chief of the Africa bureau, and also Milton Bearden, veteran of many a covert op in Africa, who agreed to be interviewed by me for the record. On Oct. 27, 1999, the New York Times got around to publishing an article by James Risen in which it was made plain that Madeleine Albright had suppressed a report from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research casting grave doubt on the Al-Shifa intelligence. The only person who still maintains that the factory was Osama Bin Laden's place for mixing Saddam Hussein's chemicals is Richard Clarke, who has been rather quiet on that subject lately. (He could well have been right at that, but not about this particular factory: See my Slate article on Clarke's Sudan contradictions.)

That was an exceptionally rich harvest of high-level disagreement overridden by a sitting president. And it strengthened the case for, to put it no higher, more "transparency" in the famously overpaid and underperforming CIA. This case has become no weaker, to say the least, in the years of George Tenet and other Clinton holdovers who left us under open skies on Sept. 11, 2001.

But now, instead of being rewarded for her probity, Mary McCarthy has been given the sack. And the New York Times rushes to her aid, with a three-hankie story on April 23, moistly titled "Colleagues Say Fired CIA Analyst Played by the Rules." This is only strictly true if she confined her disagreement to official channels, as she did when she wrote to Clinton in 1998. Sadly enough, the same article concedes that McCarthy may have lied and then eventually told the truth about having unauthorized contact with members of the press.

Well! In that case the remedy is clear. A special counsel must be appointed forthwith, to discover whether the CIA has been manipulating the media. All civil servants and all reporters with knowledge must be urged to comply, and to produce their notes or see the inside of a jail. No effort must be spared to discover the leaker. This is, after all, the line sternly proposed by the New York Times and many other media outlets in the matter of the blessed Joseph Wilson and his martyred CIA spouse, Valerie Plame.

I have a sense that this is not the media line that will be taken in the case of McCarthy, any more than it was the line taken when James Risen and others disclosed the domestic wiretapping being conducted by the NSA. Risen's story is also the object of an investigation into unlawful disclosure. One can argue that national security is damaged by unauthorized leaks, or one can argue that democracy is enhanced by them. But one cannot argue, in the case of a man who says that his CIA wife did not send him to Niger, that the proof that his wife did send him to Niger must remain a state secret. If one concerned official can brief the press off the record, then so can another.

It has long been pretty obvious to me that the official-secrecy faction within the state machinery has received a gigantic fillip from the press witch hunt against Lewis Libby and Karl Rove. What bureaucrat could believe the luck of an editorial campaign to uncover and punish leaking? A campaign that furthermore invokes the most reactionary law against disclosure this century: the Intelligence Identities Protection Act? It was obvious from the first that the press, in taking Wilson and Plame at their own estimation, was fashioning a rod for its own back. I await the squeals that will follow when this rod is applied, which it will be again and again.

Joseph Wilson update: In my article last week on Wilson's utter failure to notice the visit of Saddam Hussein's chief nuclear diplomat to Niger, I mentioned his substitution of another Iraqi name—Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf—as having just possibly approached some Niger businessmen and officials at an OAU summit in Algeria in 1999. Sahaf is now better known to us as the risible figure of "Baghdad Bob," which allowed Wilson to make mock of the whole thing. It is almost irrelevant when set beside the visit of Wissam al-Zahawie to Niger itself the same year, but at the time he attended the Algiers meeting, "Baghdad Bob" was—as I ought to have known and have since found out—Saddam Hussein's foreign minister. This fact is not mentioned in Wilson's terrible book, either. And Sahaf still had time to meet with some people from a tiny African state known only for its uranium!

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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
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Remarks from the Fray:

This is McCarthyism I can understand. Use secret intelligence information of great value to an enemy engaged in active, deadly combat with American forces in the field to further your partisan political interest.

McCarthy should do hard time. The Times should be investigated for the disclosure of military and intelligence secrets.

She took an oath. That still means something.

--jerseyman

(To reply, click here.)

Mary McCarthy [has been] fired from her position at the CIA, and [is] under fire for allegedly leaking classified information to a journalist. But when the information about those "secret prisons" came out a while ago, the administration denied, Condi Rice while traveling in Europe rejected categorically the allegations, saying there was absolutely no substance no truth to it. No "secret prisons" at all. Finished..

Back in Land of Oz ?!, Mary McCarthy is under fire for leaking classified information about "non existent classified operations". The government is going after someone who damaged the "national security" of fictional operations, or if those allegations are true, then the government lied when it denied the existence of those "illegal secret tortures prisons".

Blue pill,red pill?!.....

--heliogabalus2

(To reply, click here.)

I don't remember the NY Times being supportive of Patrick Fitzgerald investigating the Valerie Plame leak. Why? Not only because their own reporter, Judith Miller, was involved, but because it threatens journalistic freedom in general.

It is true that many at the Times dislike Bush, but to say they were really excited about a special prosecutor in the Plame case is crazy.

--Darren99

(To reply, click here.)

I've no problem with Hitchens here. The problem I have is with the idea that secrecy is necessary in a democratic state. In war, of course, it is. However, in this country, secretmongers ply their anti-democratic ideas whether at war OR peace. Monarchs, dictators, and totalitarians love secrets, too.

--kruption

(To reply, click here.)

I think putting Fitzgerald, or some other independent prosecutor, in charge of an investigation into McCarthy's alleged leak(s) is a great idea. I think she should be indicted, and tried.

But I can tell you this. No investigator will be appointed. No charge will be made. No matter what classified material she leaked, if any, her defense will rest on the law saying that classification cannot be used to shield illegal activity from scrutiny. If the claims are true--if she told reporters about renditions and torture, well then let then make the case in court that she broke the law. It's not, as it turns out, breaking the law to reveal that the government is using classification to conceal its lawbreaking.

So let them charge her. Let's have this out in the open, in the courts. We certainly won't have it out in open in Frist's senate or in Delay's House.

--BeowulfSchaeffer

(To reply, click here.)

Hitch is right (!) that the prosecution of Scooter has opened a can of worms that the press will, in the fullness of time, will wish had never been opened. But he is perverse to blame Wilson. Bush's man at the CIA fired McCarthy, not Wilson. It is Bush's man at Justice, not Wilson, who is dusting off the reactionary law. […]

--lloyd67

(To reply, click here.)

Even if it is true that Wilson was wrong about Iraqi intentions in Niger how does that justify outing his wife? It is one thing to jeopardize a particular agent at risk and quite another to expose secret prisons.

--antiox

(To reply, click here.)

There are certain government activities that need to remain covert in order for them to reap benefits. There are also certain unsavory government activities that compromise the soul and spirit of our great nation. Those in the know are in a dubious position to make the distinction between the two. In the case of secret torture prisons, I think most Americans would shudder at the thought that we must reduce ourselves to this level of inhumanity in order to defeat our enemy. If this is our only alternative for victory, the spoils, in the end, will have little significance. We will have become what we detest most in our enemy.

--travelinMike

(To reply, click here.)

(4/27)

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