Justin Raimondo of
antiwar.com asks the provocative question "what if Karl Rove isn't guilty?"
As much as he says he would like to see Bush's Brain frog-marched out of the White House, Raimondo does some well-sourced speculation in this article that Rove and other senior White House officials were merely vehicles for leaking Valerie Plame's name.
It's about a cabal of war hawks inside the administration who passed on this information to others without telling them about Plame-Wilson's deep cover status, perhaps suggesting that she was just an analyst working at a desk rather than a covert operative involved in a vitally important overseas operation, the knowledge of which was highly compartmentalized and only dispensed on a need-to-know basis. When Rove and his shills blabbed to reporters and anyone who would listen, they didn't realize that they were aiding and abetting an elaborate ploy to stick it to the CIA.
Weaving a variety of sources, he concludes, in a nutshell, that the information came from the State Department after Dick Cheney's office ordered a "work-up" on Joe Wilson as he was trying to get his story out in the months after the SOTU address.
Raimondo says that two staffers were assigned simultaneously to the State Department, specifically Bolton's office, and the Office of the Vice President. So the Vice President('s office) leaked the information to Rove and other presidential aides, who in turn leaked it to reporters all over the capital. Meaning that this is a vast conspiracy that reaches to Dick Cheney's office. Raimondo questions why the prosecutor would spend all this time and energy just in pursuit of Rove.
Was it a coincidence that two men who worked for Dick Cheney also worked for John Bolton?
Who in the administration would've had access to the specific information regarding Plame-Wilson's role in a deep-cover CIA operation involving nuclear proliferation? Why, the man who was the State Department deputy secretary in charge of "weapons of mass destruction" - the somewhat irritable if not downright reckless John Bolton, would-be ambassador to the UN, who played a central role in promulgating the Niger Uranium Myth.
Conveniently, two of Bolton's assistants, David Wurmser and John Hannah, also worked in Cheney's office. A story by UPI's Richard Sale, published last year, points at Cheney's office and specifically at Hannah as having played a key role in all this:
"Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.
"According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, were the two Cheney employees. 'We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,' one federal law-enforcement officer said. ... The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah 'that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time' as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said."
Who is John Hannah? According to Juan Cole
Hannah is a neoconservative and old cold warrior who is really more of a Soviet expert than a Middle East expert. But in the 90s he for a while headed up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank that represents the interests of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC).
Remember:
The AIPAC connection should raise a red flag: AIPAC is already at the center of a case involving espionage conducted by Israel against the United States, with Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin indicted [.pdf] for passing classified information on to longtime AIPAC leader Steve Rosen and his aide Keith Weissman, with an Israeli embassy official, chief political officer Naor Gilon, directly involved.
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