Republican National Security Leak Hypocrisy
By Larry Johnson on February 9, 2010 at 1:02 PM in Current Affairs
Aw, pity the poor, oppressed Republicans who are in high dudgeon over the Obama Administration’s “playing politics” with terrorism. Really? As I recall it was not the Obama Administration that jumped on the arrest of Abdulmuttalab-i.e., the failed underwear bomber–to tout their prowess as a fighter of Al Qaeda. Nope. It was the Republicans who insisted that Obama had surrendered to terrorists because the FBI, per standard practice, arrested the suspect because he was on U.S. territory and U.S. law applied.
As I have noted before, the FBI followed the same procedure they employed in previous, similar cases. The arrest of failed shoe bomber, Richard Reid, back in December 2001 is the very same thing. We did not hear from one elected Republican back then accusing Bush of being “soft” on terrorists. Not one insisted that Reid go to Guantanamo.
And don’t give me the bullshit that “this is different.” The only difference here is that Umar Farouk is Nigerian and flew to Detroit. Both men had training from Al Qaeda operatives. Here is what is really galling.
Republican crocodile tears on “politicizing terrorism.” Especially from the likes of Kit Bond. Here’s what I wrote five years ago:
The Bush Administration’s new offensive against leakers just reminds us that when the President’s political standing is at stake all is fair if the purpose is to protect the Pres…., er I mean the nation. Too bad George Bush did not express the same outrage when Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and others in his employ, told eager journalists that Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. I guess divulging secrets is okay if the White House needs to discredit Joe Wilson and his claim (subsequently proved true) that the President had misled the nation during his January 2004 State of the Union address. Plus, it offers the added benefit of warning the rest of the intelligence community–shut up or else. You can’t have whistle blowers coming out that would tarnish the President’s image as a tough guy waging war on the terrorists.
I also seem to recall that the Bush White House used leaks in the midst of the 2004 Presidential campagin to burnish the President’s image and keep Americans on edge. Remember the name of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan? His name was leaked to the New York Times in August of 2004 while Khan was still cooperating with Pakistani, CIA, and British authorities as part of a sting operation against Osama bin Laden’s network. On the eve of the Republican convention, unnamed senior NSC officials told New York Times reporters that Mr Khan was being used to send e-mails to al-Qaida members as part of a coordinated effort to identify and dismantle terrorist networks. Just because this leak destroyed the secret program’s effectiveness was no big deal because he helped remind Americans that George Bush was the only one who could keep us safe.
And here’s a snippet, courtesy of Laura Rozen, describing my old CIA colleague’s encounter with Senator Kit Bond. Jim Marcinkowski and I were trying to set the record straight on Valerie Plame’s outing. Check this out:
[Jim] Marcinkowski was an unlikely Bush White House antagonist. As the first chairman of the Michigan State University College Republicans, he had received an award from Jack Abramoff—the now-disgraced GOP lobbyist who was tight with the Bush White House—for heading the fastest-growing state College Republicans chapter in the country. He had helped run Reagan’s 1980 campaign outreach to Michigan college students. Marcinkowski had been a CIA officer, an FBI clerk, a Navy enlistee, a public prosecutor, and by 2003, was deputy city attorney for Royal Oak, Michigan.5In 1992, he ran, unsuccessfully, as a Republican for a state office. Marcinkowski later donated to the Bush/Cheney campaign at a 1999 fund-raiser headlined by Laura Bush. …
Nothing in his past experience as an FBI clerk, CIA officer, lawyer, and public prosecutor prepared Marcinkowski for what he faced when he went to testify before Pat Roberts’s intelligence committee about the Plame leak. “We sent a letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, saying we want to tell them something,” Marcinkowski recounted. The letter was signed by a half-dozen former CIA officers, including three from Valerie’s 1985 Career Trainee class. “They blew us off. After that, nothing happened until [then Senate minority leader] Tom Daschle contacted us and said, ‘I am going to have a Senate Democratic committee hearing,’” and asked if they would appear.
The Democratic Policy Committee hearing was supposed to take place on Friday, October 24, 2003. Shortly after it was scheduled, Marcinkowski recounts, “my boss here in Detroit got a fax from a staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Basically it said in some snotty way, ‘Somebody claims in your office to have information.’ [The staffer] made it sound like, ‘Who is this punk? If he wants to say anything, he can come in at 1pm on Thursday’”—the day before the policy committee hearing was scheduled, Marcinkowski recounts.
He provided the fax sent October 20, 2003 by then Republican chief of staff to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bill Duhnke—strangely, to Marcinkowski’s boss. “The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has received a fax from your office sent by James Marcinkowski,” Duhnke, Roberts’s staffer, wrote in his e-mail to Marcinkowski’s boss. “Mr. Marcinkowski claims to have ‘important information’ he wishes to share with the committee. . . . The letter states that ‘[t]ime is of the essence.’ Therefore, I respectfully request that Mr. Marcinkowski contact me at his earliest convenience to discuss an appearance before the Committee.” It seems obvious that, under the guise of a backhanded invitation to say something to the committee, Duhnke intended to try to get Marcinkowski in trouble with his boss. But it failed, Marcinkowski says, because his boss is an old friend with whom he had worked for years, who recognized the virtue in Marcinkowski’s desire to seek justice for their former colleague Valerie. “Like I told you, it was my classmate they exposed,” Marcinkowski says he told his boss. “He said, ‘OK, great. Go beat the shit out of somebody.’”
“The next evening I was on the plane to D.C.,” Marcinkowski continues. As it turned out, various other colleagues were out of town and Marcinkowski ended up facing twelve senators from the Senate Intelligence Committee for the closed briefing on Thursday, October 23, 2003, all by himself.
Marcinkowski told the senators that the exposure of Plame by her own government was “unprecedented. It was our classmate. We had kept a secret for eighteen years. And we were all betrayed by this White House.” Marcinkowski had prepared a statement to deliver in open session before the Senate Democratic Policy committee the next day. “I also said she was covert, and I knew it. And they were taking it very seriously.”
He took questions after his statement. One of the committee’s more moderate Republicans, Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam vet from Nebraska, asked him, do you think this White House can investigate itself?
As Marcinkowski responded that if the attorney general was trying to intimidate federal judges, why would you think they would not be prepared to intimidate a special counsel, a ranking Republican close to the White House, Christopher “Kit” Bond of Missouri, walked in.
“He went off,” Marcinkowski said. “‘I am not going to sit here and listen to this guy attack my good friend, the attorney general Ashcroft, of this country.’ “A total “food fight” ensued, Marcinkowski said, with committee member Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein accusing Bond of trying to intimidate a witness.
After he finished with his testimony and the senators’ questions, Marcinkowski went out the back door of the building and walked over to a little park between the Senate office building and Union Station. He sat down to think about what had just happened and his cell phone rang. It was Tom Daschle’s staffer, who was setting up the hearing for the next day’s Democratic Policy Committee meeting. “And she told me, ‘Jim, Pat Roberts just declared all your testimony to be secret. I don’t know what you are planning on saying tomorrow, but he declared it secret.’”
Marcinkowski, the lawyer and deputy city attorney, was stunned. “I sat on the park bench, in a daze. I didn’t know what the hell to do. Now it hits me, that is why the Senate Select Intelligence Committee had scheduled their testimony for the day before the Senate Democratic public hearing. Until that happened we didn’t hear shit from the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. They slapped the secrecy thing on it, that was their intention,” to try to prevent Valerie’s CIA colleagues from testifying publicly about what had happened to her, and why it was a betrayal of everyone in the CIA.
Marcinkowski called a close friend, an attorney in Detroit, to get legal advice on what he should do, since what he had told the Senate Intelligence Committee was exactly what he planned to tell the Senate Democratic Policy Committee the next day, and Roberts had appeared to try to suppress that testimony by, implausibly, declaring it classified. “‘Jim, I tell you what,’” his friend told him. “‘I already know what you’re going to do. I am going to call all your friends and start collecting bond money right now,’” Marcinkowski recounts. “I told him, ‘You think this is funny. I’m sitting here in a park, by my lonesome, and they’re saying I’m violating all kinds of laws.’ And he said, ‘Yep, and I know exactly what you are doing tomorrow morning.’”
Gathering courage, Marcinkowski called Daschle’s staffer back. “You call Roberts’ office and you tell him, I said that he can go straight to hell,” Marcinkowski says he told her. ….
People like Kit Bond were nowhere to be found when the Bush Administration was playing politics with national security. In fact, they encouraged the reprehensible behavior. Now they want us to believe they have found religion? I don’t think so.
by Ronald Scott
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