Isikoff, Corn, Goodman-Democracy Now!-Rush Transcript Part 1:

[babylonsister]

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/12/139208

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined right now in Washington, D.C. by the book's authors, Michael Isikoff and David Corn. Michael Isikoff is an investigative correspondent for Newsweek magazine. His co-author, David Corn, is the Washington editor of The Nation magazine. He’s also the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!

DAVID CORN: Good morning.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you both with us. Let's start with Michael Isikoff. Richard Armitage, how do you know he is the source? Tell us the story.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Well, when we started work on this book late last year, the Valerie Plame leak case was clearly going to be a part of it, because I think our view is that the whole controversy over the Joe Wilson, Valerie Wilson affair grew out of the administration's faulty selling of the war on Iraq and its need to defend its pre-war sales pitch, so that when Joe Wilson came forward in the summer of 2003, they had to fight back very hard, because they realized at that moment that the faulty intelligence that was used to sell the war in Iraq was becoming a front-and-center major political issue. We had been in there a few months. No WMD, weapons of mass destruction, had been found.

AMY GOODMAN: And Joe Wilson, an ambassador -- Joe Wilson went to Niger, just to remind people.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Right. And had been the first sort of insider to come forward and say, I told them that what they were saying -- or told them that this wasn't true, and yet they used it anyway. Since then, there have been a parade of people who have said similar things and many of them come forward for the first time in Hubris, and we talk about the many, many dissents that were going on within the U.S. intelligence community.

Anyway, back to Armitage. Clearly the big mystery in Washington was who was Robert Novak's initial source that got the whole controversy started, that erupted it. And in the course of reporting on the book, we were able to nail down that it was unquestionably Richard Armitage, a surprising figure to a lot of people. He had not who many people had expected initially. He was a member of the small moderate cell within the administration that had misgivings about the march to war in Iraq. And in the course of reporting it, we had on-the-record sources, Carl Ford, the State Department intelligence chief, who told us that Richard Armitage had confessed, “I may be the guy who caused this whole thing. I was the one who spoke to Novak and told him there are other people,” and we described in great detail Armitage's confession to Secretary of State Powell on the morning of October 1st, when Robert Novak wrote a second column saying that his source was a senior administration official who was not a partisan gunslinger.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us that scene, that setting.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Yes. That Novak column runs just a few days after it has been disclosed that the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson. A lot of people suspect that the leak had come out of the White House, and in fact, as we amply document, the White House on its own, White House officials were pointing reporters towards Valerie Wilson's role. But it is one of the ironies of this case that the initial leaker was, in fact, Armitage. He had met with Robert Novak on July 8th, 2003, in his office, a meeting that was recommended to him by another surprising figure, Ken Duberstein, former Ronald Reagan chief of staff, very close to Colin Powell. Duberstein was urging Armitage to meet with Novak, who he didn’t have a close relationship with. And they met, and Armitage provided this information to Novak. When the criminal investigation gets launched, Novak writes the second column. Armitage is at home reading the paper early in the morning and essentially freaks out and calls Colin Powell and says, “I think I’m the guy he's talking about. What are we going to do?” There’s a frantic series of meetings at the State Department that morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain Armitage's relationship with Powell.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Deputy Secretary of State number two. They were very close, old friends. And they realized they had an enormous problem. What they had to -- they did contact the Justice Department. Will Taft, the State Department legal counsel, gets called in. He says, “We've got to let the Justice Department know.” Armitage -- they arrange a meeting for Armitage to meet with the FBI the next day. But what they’re really worried about is the White House. If the White House finds out, they are going to leak that it's Armitage publicly to deflect attention from themselves, and that would then point the finger at Powell and Armitage. They were sort of known as thick of sleeves, anyway.

And Taft, there is this extraordinary scene where we describe Taft calling Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel, saying, “Look, we have some information relevant to this information.” Taft is worried that Gonzales is going to say, “Tell me what it is. And then we'll let the President know or Karl Rove know,” and instantly the word would get out. Gonzales never asks any questions. Perhaps it's emblematic. Perhaps he’s playing it by the book, just doing the right thing, doesn’t want to step on a Justice Department investigation. Or perhaps it’s emblematic of, you know, larger incuriosity at the White House about matters. But for whatever reason, Taft, Powell and Armitage breathe a huge sigh of relief. The information doesn't get to the White House, and it stays secret for three years, until we revealed it in Hubris.

AMY GOODMAN: And you, David Corn, on the issue of what Valerie Plame was doing at the time that she was outed.

DAVID CORN: I think there were two big mysteries in the Plame case. One was, who was the first leaker to Bob Novak? And the other was, what did Valerie Plame, Valerie Wilson do at the CIA? After the leak came out and people raised criticisms and were outraged about it and expressed disagreement with the White House and pointed to it as a, perhaps, example of White House thuggery or hardball politics, a lot of people on the conservative side, a lot of Bush defenders, said, well, she was just an analyst. In fact, Robert Novak reported in that second column that Michael just described that he had been told that she was just an analyst. In other words, she was a paper-pusher, a desk jockey, and her outing had been basically insignificant, nothing to get all hot and bothered about, certainly nothing that you would need to bring a special counsel in to investigate.

Well, for years -- and I’m kind of surprised by this -- what she actually did at the CIA had remained a secret, until our book came out and we revealed that she was no analyst. She was an undercover operations officer. She was chief of operations in a unit called the Joint Task Force on Iraq. That was part of a greater unit called the Counter-Proliferation Division, which is part of the super-secret Operations Directorate, which is the part of the CIA, not the analytical side, it’s the part of the CIA that mounts espionage operations and covert actions around the world. And what the Joint Task Force on Iraq was doing, what she had been doing for two years prior to being outed, was seeking intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. So it had been her job, literally her job, to find the evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq and the argument the White House had been making for two years.

She worked with a staff of ten to twelve officers. She traveled overseas to oversee these operations, and they had gotten some operations going. Their basic target was Iraqi scientists, scientists who could tell them about any sort of WMD program Iraq might have. They tried to find them out out of Iraq. They tried to find them inside Iraq. And it was very hard work. They built up a stable of a couple of sources, not too many. But every Iraqi scientist they got to, either directly or indirectly -- sometimes they sent relatives to Iraq and said put these questions to your cousin, your brother, whoever -- all the answers they got back were, “We don't know anything about any WMD programs.” They couldn't find any evidence. And they were quite frustrated, the people on her unit, because they could not tell if they were getting the right answer, which is there are no WMDs, or that they just were not finding the right sources. But they dutifully wrote up their reports that this scientist or that scientist denies there are any WMD activities going on in Iraq and sent them into the CIA bureaucracy, where they disappeared.

But at the end of the day here, you have the situation where, as Mike said, it wasn't just Armitage. Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, others at the White House, set on undermining and discrediting Joe Wilson, were leaking information about her to reporters. This was classified information. And they, you know, purposefully or not, certainly recklessly, they undermined and destroyed her career and outed the CIA officer who had been tasked with perhaps the administration's top priority.

AMY GOODMAN: When we come back from break, I want to ask about why Karl Rove was not indicted, but Scooter Libby was. We're talking to two investigative reporters, Michael Isikoff for Newsweek and David Corn for The Nation. They have just published a book. It’s called Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. Back in a minute.