The Royal Scam

dr. elsewhere here

The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.

Sometimes I feel like the scullery maid to the King’s butler; way below the royal food chain.

It is increasingly impossible to keep up with stuff these days. From all the other demanding matters making headlines, I’ll choose today to address yet again the ongoing saga of CIA outings and the accompanying intrigue.

Consider: Joe posted yesterday another pot pourri of amazing and unbelievable (yet inevitable) features of today’s nightmare landscape, in which he noted the latest revelation from David Corn and Michael Isikoff’s book, Hubris. Joe’s brief point emphasized the implication in Corn’s teaser article that it was Cheney who dug out Plame’s ID with the agency. This is, of course, not at all trivial, though we’ve long suspected Dick since he made such frequent and unprecedented trips to Langley.
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However, a couple of other points in that article struck me with more force; I put one of them in a comment that I'll copy here:

what was most fascinating about it in my mind was not so much the implications of cheney's role in pressuring the agents for favorable data, but that valerie plame was in charge of the group that was investigating iraq's wmd's: we've heard through rawstory and msnbc before the plame was involved in iran's wmd status, but this is the first indication of her role - which was managerial and pivotal - in iraq.

i've expressed several times previously my suspicions that plame's role was far more wrapped up in the admin's agenda than was being discussed. and of course, she could never discuss it publicly.

but there it is; not only was wilson pursued for calling out the prez for misleading the congress and the public on iraq's wmd's, but the method of punishing him also got rid of an agent in charge of all that fact-finding they hate so much.

the excuse they used to out her - that she set up her husband's boondoggle - always seemed terribly lame to me. though corn doesn't insinuate this in his article, i've always been suspicious that cheney just nearly had the big one thinking about getting rid of these two problems with one stone.

So much ado to keep up The Royal Scam.

Plame’s position and role at the CIA always struck me as non-coincidental when it came to Cheney’s decision to use her to put the scare in her husband. In fact, not only did the OVP spin of a boondoggle always seem just way too lame for any real neurons to entertain, but Wilson’s focus on himself and his own role and importance always felt …a bit like a forced understatement of the whole case.

Put another way, the notion that the OVP and WH would go to such an extreme to get a former diplomat to shut his trap did not pass the logic test, even for the Bush Bozos. The fact that Wilson’s wife actually worked there raised my radar from the get-go that there had to be something about her role, her position, her official activities, that made them extra nervous about her hubby’s sniffin’ around the truth. It was the combo punch; Wilson alone didn’t quite cut it as an annoyance worthy of risking the breaking of a law. Even Plame as generic NOC didn’t get the radar rotating. There has always been this suspicion that she had something to do specifically with their war plans, either Iraq or Iran or both. Seemed to me, anyway.

This is the first we have heard about the Joint Task Force on Iraq, which was formed – and here comes the other point and the really big bombshell – prior to 9/11, and only months after Bush took office. CHS at FDL also picked up on the importance of this almost throw-away line about the formation of the task force prior to 9/11. This little blockbuster is consistent with Paul O’Neill’s and Richard Clarke’s reports of WH obsessions with Iraq, which were of course dismissed by the rightwingnuts. And emptywheel astutely points out that Corn reveals other operations Plame was involved with, operations that were key to the buildup to the war, including those aluminum tubes, recruiting family members of Iraqi scientists, and canvassing individuals who walked in to US embassies in the middle east.

All to establish the glory of The Royal Scam.

How much more information do we need here?

With all the information we do have, it's not hard to imagine how these gangstahs must have responded to Wilson’s inconvenient truth-telling, from the Big Dick’s little mind: After all the cookin’ and fixin’ and sexin’ up the data to get us into Iraq, including lying and misrepresenting the facts in the SOTU, and gettin’ us there and accomplishing the mission, then comes some former diplomat (who just happens to have been the last American to actually speak with Saddam, and whose bravery in Baghdad as the Gulf War was cranking up brought great praise from Bush I) who starts stirring up some noise about how he had himself found the Niger uranium story to be untrue. So you ask for info on this creep, and discover – lo and behold – his wife is the very CIA agent who’s been heading up the JTFI and throwing you whiffle-balls when you wanted real game. You’re immediately suspicious that hubby and wifey are in this together, so you snoop further and discover (via an inaccurate memo) that she was actually in the room in a meeting at the CIA about this African trip, and (here’s where the inaccuracy kicks in) played a “key role” in sending him. Aha, you exclaim to your pet dragon as it feeds on the blood of Karl Rove’s campaign victims. They’re in league, and she arranged for this trip! Why, what a namby pamby wuss he really is, not a hero at all; his wife gets his work for him, and packs his lunch, too! I’ll bet he eats milquetoast, don’t you, my precious?

The dragon purrs. He loves the scent of The Royal Scam.

The smear campaign thus begins, and please note: This all occurred (hypothetically this way, of course, but in real time…) before Wilson wrote the infamous NYTimes op-ed. The same one op-ed Dick scribbled all over. Think back to those choice little notes; this one stands out: ”Or did his wife send him on a junket?”

Cheney already knew of Plame’s status by this time. He had to have known, or that question would make no sense; how would he have known to even ask it if he didn’t know her CIA status?

And add this from Hubris:

In the book, Rove is quoted as having told MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews that the Wilsons "were trying to screw the White House so the White House was going to screw them back." [emphasis dr. e’s]

Those bold words may seem perhaps a small thing, but no doubt a point that Fitz worried like a terrier in interviews and testimonies: The OVP and WH saw Wilson and wife as a team. They included Wilson’s wife in the smear operation; she became the tool they would use to strike them both down. They saw them as a “them” and saw them both as threats. And Plame’s status as CIA did not interfere with the WH/OVP agenda one bit. The law according to IIPA did not matter one bit. The law, the security of this country, the truth about needing to go to war? None of these things mattered one bit.

It is easy to understand why Wilson focused attention on himself instead of his wife’s role; to do otherwise would have played right into the crime. Consider the restraint and remarkable care he has had to muster and maintain on an ongoing basis in order to step cautiously but honestly away from including her specific CIA role in all this. That, my friends, is the stuff true diplomacy is made of.

Of course, it is also easy to imagine the interesting OVP/WH panic that mounted when Wilson started up his inquiry, not long after the ’03 SOTU. Contained at first, controlled, but then spinning out of all mind and reason when the diplomat would not disappear into the mass of sheeple and the paid press who went along to get along. When the first articles began to appear, Kristoff, PIncus, ...imagine the panic. They had to know this was bad PR, if not flat out illegal (Addington replaced Libby, after all). Plus, remember these guys do exhibit inordinate volumes of hubris; they had to be furious, just downright outraged that anyone – no matter who – would dare to question their decisions, would dare to interfere with their carefully laid plans.

All to maintain the glory of The Royal Scam.

Consider the combination of those emotions, panic and outrage. Consider how they cloud the judgment and lead to even worse decisions, even worse actions. Consider how, for this type of character (or lack thereof; more on that soon), the combination of these emotions tends to galvanize the resolve, tends to calcify the thinking even further, tends to petrify the worldview.

For those in power, anyway. For those at their mercy, the tendency is to buckle at various points of pressure. The sources in this book, Hubris, most of them will not be named; their point of pressure is their career, their livelihood. How does that Sinclair quote go? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Some require enormous payoffs to affix their allegiance. Others want more power. Still others will settle for honors, however hollow. Many others, though, remain silent to varying degrees, and thus participate in feeding the beast. All just to keep their house payments and the two SUVs in the garage, unthinkable luxuries to most who roam this planet, especially where this corporate cabal leaves its footprints. These are the silent enemies, the good foks whose inaction leads to the triumph of evil.

But for those the very vocal manipulating monsters have publicly dubbed “the enemy,” a strangely similar dilemma awaits, but of course the stakes are much higher and far more immediate. Those who are not bombed out of existence or subsistence, a gulag awaits, one that offers nothing more than a tortured life over a tortured death. All, presumably, for “intelligence” that will protect our "security?"

Oh, the gods are mocking us now. I hear it in the songs.

He reads the letter
How they are paid in gold
Just to babble in the back room
All night and waste their time
And they wandered in
From the city of St. John without a dime

See the glory
Of the royal scam