"Investigate The CIA

Posted 10/24/2005

Scandal: While the Bush administration hunkers down on indictment watch, Congress should take a look at political — and possibly illegal — activity by agenda-driven intelligence operatives.

Whatever fate befalls White House adviser Karl Rove, Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Lewis Libby and any other administration official caught up in the prosecution over the leaked name of a CIA officer, there's a back story to this case that should not be ignored.

It's about the CIA itself.

This is a story that most of the media will be trying hard not to cover. They share former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's stated desire to see Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald "frog-march" Rove out of the White House in handcuffs.

So Congress should leave the media no choice. Hold hearings. Put the CIA on the spot and blow the lid off any politically motivated funny business. Bring some transparency to what has become a very murky issue.

We believe that someone needs to answer the questions raised recently by Joseph F. DiGenova, a former federal prosecutor and independent counsel:

Was there a covert operation against the president?

If so, who was behind it?

These aren't the musings of the tinfoil-hat brigade. A sober-minded case can be made that at least some people in the CIA may have acted inappropriately to discredit the administration as a way of salvaging their own reputations after the intelligence debacles of 9-11 and Iraqi WMD.

DiGenova, in a conversation with columnist Cliff Kincaid of the conservative group Accuracy in Media, pointed to the oddness of the event that got the current scandal rolling: The recommendation from now-unmasked CIA agent Valerie Plame that her husband, ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson, be sent on a trip to Africa to check out reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium for its nuclear weapons program from the country of Niger.

"It seems to me somewhat strange, in terms of CIA tradecraft," DiGenova said, "that if you were really attempting to protect the identity of a covert officer, why would you send her husband overseas on a mission without a confidentiality agreement, and then allow him when he came back to the United States to write an op-ed piece in The New York Times about it."

Another angle worth investigating is the CIA's own possible use of leaks. When columnist Robert Novak revealed Plame's identity, someone leaked the news that the CIA sent a referral to the Justice Department seeking an investigation. The referral was classified, writes Stephen Hayes in The Weekly Standard, and anyone who divulged it would have been breaking the law.

So who leaked the referral, and why doesn't the CIA refer this matter to Justice, as it did the Plame matter?

Hayes raises the possibility that the leak came from within the CIA and that the CIA's lawyers "are reluctant to call for an investigation for fear of what such an investigation might reveal."

The CIA, of course, is supposed to be above politics. But it is increasingly viewed with suspicion by conservatives (such as Hayes, DiGenova and Kincaid) and with real affection by the Left.

Here's what Robert Dreyfuss, a columnist for the liberal American Prospect, has to say:

"For liberals and leftists accustomed to viewing the CIA as a rogue agency prone to unaccountable covert actions abroad, it is ironic that since 9-11, the CIA has emerged as a bastion of opposition to George W. Bush's imperial foreign policy."

As long as that's just an outsider's opinion, no problem. But if people within the CIA now see their role in that light, then the country is headed for real trouble.

http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=20&artnum=4&issue=20051024