[Clips] Christopher Hitchens: What Goes Around Comes Around

[R.A. Hettinga]

--- begin forwarded text


 Delivered-To: clips at philodox.com
 Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 06:48:56 -0500
 To: Philodox Clips List <clips at philodox.com>
 From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
 Subject: [Clips] Christopher Hitchens: What Goes Around Comes Around
 Reply-To: rah at philodox.com
 Sender: clips-bounces at philodox.com

 <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB113072864998883959.html>

 The Wall Street Journal

  ?   October 31, 2005
  COMMENTARY

 What Goes Around Comes Around
 By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
 October 31, 2005; Page A16

 The Republicans who drafted and proposed the Intelligence Identities
 Protection Act in the early days of the Reagan administration, in a vain
 attempt to end the career of CIA defector Philip Agee, could not have known
 that their hasty legislation would one day paralyze the workings of a
 conservative wartime administration. Nor could the eager internationalist
 Wilsonians who rammed through the 1917 Espionage Act -- the most repressive
 legislation since the Alien and Sedition laws -- have expected it to be
 used against government officials making the case for an overseas military
 intervention.

 But then, who would have thought that liberals and civil libertarians --
 the New York Times called for the repeal of the IIPA as soon as it was
 passed, or else for it to be struck down by the courts -- would find these
 same catch-all statutes coming in handy for the embarrassment of Team Bush?
 The outrage of the left at any infringement of CIA prerogatives is only the
 least of the ironies in the indictment of Lewis Libby for discussing
 matters the disclosure of which, in and of itself, appears to have violated
 no known law.

 To judge by his verbose and self-regarding performance, containing as it
 did the most prolix and least relevant baseball analogy ever offered to a
 non-Chicago audience, Patrick Fitzgerald is not a man with whom the ironic
 weighs heavily. Nor does he seem discountenanced by his failure to find any
 breach in the IIPA or even the more broadly drawn Espionage Act. Mr. Libby
 stands accused of misstating his conversations with almost every journalist
 in Washington except for the only one -- Robert Novak -- who actually
 published the totemic name of Valerie Plame. "We have not made any
 allegation that Mr. Libby knowingly and intentionally outed a covert
 agent," Mr. Fitzgerald contentedly confirmed.

 If -- and one has to say "if" -- the transmission of any classified
 information is a crime, then as Mr. Fitzgerald also confirmed, one would be
 in the deep waters of the Espionage Act, which is "a very difficult statute
 to interpret." Actually, it is a very easy act to interpret. It declares
 that even something very well-known is secret if the state defines it as
 secret: the same principle as the dreaded British Official Secrets Act. As
 to the critical question of whether Mr. Plame had any cover to blow, Mr.
 Fitzgerald was equally insouciant: "I am not speaking to whether or not
 Valerie Wilson was covert."

 In the absence of any such assertion or allegation, one must be forgiven
 for wondering what any of this gigantic fuss can possibly be about. I know
 some apparently sensible people who are prepared to believe, still, that a
 Machiavellian cabal in the White House wanted to punish Joseph Wilson by
 exposing his wife to embarrassment and even to danger. So strong is this
 belief that it envisages Karl Rove (say) deciding to accomplish the foul
 deed by tipping off Robert Novak, one of the most anti-Iraq-war and pro-CIA
 journalists in the capital, as if he were precisely the pliant tool one
 would select for the dastardly work. And then, presumably to thicken the
 plot, Mr. Novak calls the CIA to confirm, as it readily did, that Ms. Plame
 was in the agency's employ.

 Meanwhile, and just to make things more amusing, George Tenet, in his
 capacity as Director of Central Intelligence, tells Dick Cheney that he
 employs Mr. Wilson's wife as an analyst of the weird and wonderful world of
 WMD. So jealously guarded is its own exclusive right to "out" her, however,
 that no sooner does anyone else mention her name than the CIA refers the
 Wilson/Plame disclosure to the Department of Justice.

 Mr. Fitzgerald, therefore, seems to have decided to act "as if." He
 conducts himself as if Ms. Plame's identity was not widely known, as if she
 were working under "non official cover" (NOC), as if national security had
 been compromised, and as if one or even two catch-all laws had been broken.
 By this merely hypothetical standard, he has performed exceedingly well,
 even if rather long-windedly, before pulling up his essentially empty net.

 However, what if one proposes an alternative "what if" narrative? What if
 Mr. Wilson spoke falsely when he asserted that his wife, who was not in
 fact under "non-official cover," had nothing to do with his visit to Niger?
 What if he was wrong in stating that Iraqi envoys had never even expressed
 an interest in Niger's only export? (Most European intelligence services
 stand by their story that there was indeed such a Baathist initiative.)
 What if his main friends in Niger were the very people he was supposed to
 be investigating?

 Well, in that event, and after he had awarded himself some space on an
 op-ed page, what was to inhibit an employee of the Bush administration from
 calling attention to these facts, and letting reporters decide for
 themselves? The CIA had proven itself untrustworthy or incompetent on
 numerous occasions before, during and after the crisis of Sept. 11, 2001.
 Why should it be the only agency of the government that can invoke the law,
 broken or (as in this case) unbroken, to protect itself from leaks while
 protecting its own leakers?

 All worthwhile information in Washington is "classified" one way or
 another. We have good reason to be grateful to various officials and
 reporters who have, in our past, decided that disclosure was in the public
 interest. None of the major criticisms of the Bush administration would
 have become available if it were not for the willingness of many former or
 serving bureaucrats to "go public." But this widely understood right -- now
 presumably in some jeopardy -- makes no sense if supporters of the
 administration are not permitted to reply in kind.

 Logic and history suggest that there will be a turn of the political wheel,
 and that Dems will regain control of the White House or the Congress. Will
 they be willing to accept the inflexible standard of secrecy that they have
 exacted in the Wilson imbroglio? Will they forbid their own civil servants
 to put a case, in confidence, to members of the press? Will they allow
 their trusted loyalists to be dragged before grand juries, and the
 reporters to be forced to open notebooks to the gaze of any prosecutor? The
 answer today is presumably "yes," which brings me back to where I began,
 and to the stupid acquiescence of Republicans in the passage of a law that
 should never have allowed to hollow out the First Amendment in the first
 place.

 Mr. Hitchens, columnist for Vanity Fair, is the author of "Thomas
 Jefferson: Author of America" (Eminent Lives, 2005).
 --
 -----------------
 R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
 The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
 "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
 [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
 experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
 _______________________________________________
 Clips mailing list
 Clips at philodox.com
 http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'