The Karl Rove/Valerie Plame story has reached critical mass and even the mainstream media is discussing it. I won’t bother to reiterate the facts or speculate further since everyone is blogging, chatting and otherwise electronically interacting. If you feel the need, simply go to HuffingtonPost.com or DailyKos.com and you’ll find as much speculation and discussion as anyone could desire. There are two interesting points that a casual observer might miss, however.
Point #1
This story is somewhat controversial (and murky and complicated so bear with me) but Valerie Plame may not be the first undercover agent to be outed by the Bush Administration for political purposes. On July 2004, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a high-level al Qaeda operative, was arrested and “turned” by Pakistani intelligence. Khan had been communicating through encrypted emails with an al Qaeda cell that was planning an attack in Great Britain; his laptop also contained 3-year-old information about a possible attack against financial buildings in the U.S.
On July 26-29th, 2004 the Democratics held their 2004 convention and nominated John Kerry with the usual fanfare. Typically, this type of three-day-long political advertisement provides the candidate with a bump in the polls. On Aug. 1, 2004, Tom Ridge issued an alert that al Qaeda was planning an attack on financial buildings in the U.S. and gave some background information to reporters. John Kerry did not get any significant improvement in the polls, possibly due to fear and the public perception that Bush had a “tougher stance” on terrorism. The New York Times printed Khan’s name on Aug. 2nd and British intelligence had to prematurely arrest 13 suspects. They had to release 5 of them due to lack of evidence. British officials were really pissed off.
The question is, how did the NY Times get the name? The reporters stated in this article that they received the name from a Pakistani source. But how did the reporters know they should be looking in Pakistan? I’m completely sure that Karl Rove had prior knowledge about Ridge’s announcement; Rove was running the campaign and this warning had obvious political implications. On the other hand, could Ridge be sure that a U.S. attack was not imminent? If he guessed wrong and an attack occurred, the consequences would be dire. For more info, check here on wikipedia.org, here on cnn.com and here on antiwar.com.
It’s late so I’ll finish this tomorrow.
Technorati Tags: Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, Karl Rove
In the wake of the leaked British memo describing a possible UK/US partial withdrawal from Iraq, I thought I’d give a short recap of the “good guys” that will be taking over security duties.
1) For starters, there is the Kurdish Peshmerga and related militia who have been accused of sectarian-based murder and torture. The Kurds were brutalized by Saddam Hussein in a deliberate campaign to marginalize them in the oil-rich region around Kirkuk. According to a Human Rights Watch report, the initial Kurdish response in post-Saddam Iraq was to abuse Iraqi Arabs in a similar fashion. This outburst of violence was quelled but soon erupted again, this time also involving the other sizable Kirkuk minority group, the Turkomen. As it stands today, the Kurds, Turkomen and Iraqi Arabs have avoided flat-out civil war but as this May 23rd, 2005 article in USA Today states,
‘In January, four Kurds were dragged into the street in Hawija, a mostly Arab town 20 miles southwest of Kirkuk, and shot to death. Then in March, an Arab police major and three officers were killed in Kirkuk by a roadside bomb during a funeral procession for a fellow officer who was killed the day before by another roadside bomb. The Iraqi Institute for Human Rights in Kirkuk, an independent group, has documented more than 300 cases of vanished Arabs during the past two months. “Every day, someone is in here complaining about it,” says Jalal Ibrahim, deputy director of the institute. Armed Kurdish militia, called peshmerga, or “those who face death,” still patrol the streets in pickups. Other members of the militia have joined the local police.’
You may notice that USA Today (not my favorite media source btw) tries to put a positive spin on the story but even they can’t make death squads sound good.
2) The Mehdi militia. I can’t find much current info except for this article from The Guardian stating that some have joined the Basra police force. Moqtada al-Sadr is obviously still an important figure.
3) The Badr Brigade. This Iranian-trained militia has been targeting Sunni religious figures. The above link and this one also contain some information on this group. There has been a good deal of speculation that the Badr Brigade has been killing ordinary Sunnis as a possible prelude to civil war.
4) The Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. Really not good. There are rather graphic descriptions in this link. The human rights abuses may not reach the volume of Saddam Hussein’s regime but the techniques appear to be the same.
With friends like these . . .
I’ve been lurking at HuffingtonPost.com since they have all the latest info on the Karl Rove/Valerie Plame case and tonight, as I obsessively surfed through news sites, this came up. It appears that Rove may really have screwed up, i.e. Bush’s brain had a cerebral infarct. Everyone was sure that he was just too damned smart to get caught; personally, I thought he had ordered someone else to do the dirty deed, like Scooter Libby, for example. Recently, however, I noticed a crack in the White House stone wall.
If nothing else, most Washington pundits will admit that the Bush Administration has excellent discipline on keeping the party propaganda line consistent. When talking to the media, everyone, up and down the hierarchy, uses the same language to describe the same subjects like good little apparatchiks. This isn’t by accident; it’s Karl Rove’s trademark. (Well, that and incredibly sleazy smear campaigns.) So, a few weeks ago, it was surprising to see Dick Cheney spout off that the Iraqi insurgency was in its last throes while Donald Rumsfeld said it could last for more than a decade. Was Karl Rove sweating over the Plame investigation and blew off the Bush Administration propaganda synchronization?
Friday: also my day to let Karen rant about foreign policy. (She’s a news junkie, but doesn’t claim to be an expert.)
Most people were expecting Rehnquist to resign due to poor health, so when Sandra Day O’Connor left, the pundits were shocked. The mainstream media swung into action, eulogizing O’Connor’s career, handicapping the race among likely replacement candidates, and interviewing pro-choice Democrats who sounded the alarm that Roe v. Wade was under serious attack. As a pro-choice feminist, I agree that abortion-rights are in deep trouble from the far-right ideologues, but people are missing the main point.