Hitchens: Time for a Special Prosecutor?

Christopher Hitchens uses his Slate soapbox to slice and dice the discredited 42nd President for bombing a Sudanese pharma factory to distract from his dalliances with portly sex-object Monica L. Hitchens masterfully does an autopsy on the feckless rogue CIA before and after 9/11:

That [Sudanese second-guessing by senior CIA types] 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!

Wilson now can be unmasked as an agent provocateur, in a passive sense, for a CIA faction aiming to discredit GWB's intention to invade Iraq. The British MI-6 still insists there was some connection between Iraq and Niger, but the MSM has gone tabloid and found a Special Prosecutor to serve in Ken Starr's role vis-a-vis Bush.

Another Special Prosecutor will be investigating real treason, not the third-tier desk jockeys that Plame and her compliant hubby, both gold-diggers on the make, obviously turned out to be.