Two senior officials in the administration of George W. Bush are guilty of a security breach punishable by 10 years in prison and the country is relying on Attorney General John Ashcroft to get to the bottom of the case.
That would be the same John Ashcroft who lost his senatorial re-election bid to a man who had been killed in a plane crash. The same one who now routinely uses provisions of the misnamed Patriot Act to go after American citizens accused of morality crimes.
Early in 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney dispatched Joseph Wilson -- a highly respected career former State Department diplomat -- to the tiny African nation of Niger. His mission? To find out whether reports that Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain "yellowcake" uranium were true. It was an important mission, since, if Saddam was actually trying to buy the stuff, he was probably trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program.
Wilson went to Africa and checked it out, found out the story was so much hooey and came back and reported as much to his superiors. He was astounded when, last January, Bush used the "yellowcake" story in his State of the Union address as one reason to go to war with Iraq. Wilson went to the press.
Shortly afterward, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote a piece that quoted "two senior White House officials." They told Novak that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA agent specializing in weapons of mass destruction.
In quick time, the woman's career was over, and everyone she had ever worked with overseas to further American interests was in danger of his or her life.
Last week, the CIA asked the Justice Department to conduct a probe into who in the Bush White House revealed the agent's identity. We seriously doubt that Ashcroft possesses the ethics to do so. He has shown himself to be a liar, a conniver and a partisan politician of the first order.
Republicans in Congress said the Justice Department couldn't be trusted to investigate the Monica Lewinsky scandal and, by any measure, the Plame affair is far more serious.
We would join New York Sen. Charles Schumer in calling for an independent investigation into this act of treason. We would recommend that any and all resources of the federal government be employed to track down the culprits. We would further recommend that the two "senior White House officials," traitors during a time of war, be shot at dawn.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | October 7 2003 |