Some Context on Scowcroft

by emptywheel

I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors. -- George HW Bush

It appears the Sunday shows and Brent Scowcroft's scathing condemnation will have to tide us over until the indictments start popping up on Fitzgerald's website. So I'd like to take a moment, before the New Yorker piece comes out, to consider how closely the comments may coincide with the impending indictments (if any).

Larry Wilkerson's outburst might be timed to coincide with the impending indictments, if you believe he is "the man who would say what Powell was thinking but was too discreet to say." But there's an even greater chance Scowcroft's statements are. That's because Scowcroft was involved in the Plame Affair from the start.

Scowcroft and Wilson first met when Poppy Bush was declaring Wilson a "true American hero" after Wilson got back from Baghdad in 1991. But they grew to know each other better through their mutual involvement in the American-Turkish Council. They discussed the rising push for war, but Scowcroft assured Wilson that the "right-wing nuts" would not "win the policy." (Wilson 290) In Fall 2002, as both Scowcroft and Wilson started publishing op-eds against regime change, Scowcroft was at least partially responsible for bringing Wilson to the attention of the Administration. Scowcroft brought a copy of Wilson's San Jose Mercury News column to show some people in the White House.

I sent my article to Scowcroft, Baker, and the president's father out of courtesy, because I referred to the lessons learned in the diplomacy of the first Gulf War.

[snip]

Brent called me when he received the article. He kindly asked if he could "take it over to the White House," only about two blocks from his downtown office. He said that he  thought senior officials ought to read the views of somebody who actually had experience in Iraq and with Saddam's government. By this, I took him to mean that he intended to share it with the national security adviser, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, or her deputy, Stephen Hadley. (Wilson 295-6)

So Scowcroft is--at the very least--witness to the fact that someone in the Administration knew about Wilson well before his July 6 2003 article.

But I don't think that's where Scowcroft's involvement in this affair ends. In his description of how he made up his mind to write his op-ed, Wilson says the following.

The last straw came when Dr. Rice, in a June 8 appearance on Meet the Press, told Tim Russert: "Maybe somebody in the bowels of the Agency knew something about this, but nobody in my circles." That was a lie, and I knew it. She had to have known it as well. The next day, I called a former government official who knew Dr. Rice and expressed my disgust at her continuing refusal to tell the truth. He replied that the interview had not been one of her finest moments. (Wilson 332)

I don't think it's too wild a guess to imagine this former government official is Scowcroft. After all, he was probably responsible for introducing Wilson's writing to Condi. So it would make sense for Wilson to call Scowcroft to share his disgust with Condi's claim that she had never heard of his trip; Scowcroft may know, after all, that she did. And the comment that the interview "had not been one of her finest moments" sure sounds like something a mentor would say to express disappointment at seeing his protege fail.

And if you believe that speculation, then this passage...

For four months, from March to July, I did what I could to encourage the White House to come clean on what it knew, including speaking to people close to the administration, senior officials at the State Department, and to staffs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. [emphasis mine]

...suggests Wilson may have been working through Scowcroft (and others) for months to try to get the Administration to admit they knew the Niger claims were bunk (which again may mean Scowcroft knows for a fact that Condi knew about Wilson's Niger trip). Granted, this involvement is not great. But it suggests Scowcroft was an ongoing ally of Wilson as he tried to get the Administration to tell the truth.

All this, frankly, makes me a little wary of the Scowcroft piece. Don't get me wrong. I look forward to seeing the Bush Administration receive a public whipping from a respected Republican elder statesman. (And the whipping Junior will get from Poppy? That's just gravy.)

But I worry that the Wilkerson piece and the Scowcroft piece will turn the impending court case into a fight between two (Republican) factions rather than a fight between the law and those who broke the law.

I probably don't need to worry. After all, if Scowcroft was this closely involved, there's no way the Bush Administration can attack him as a Wilson partisan without admitting that Scowcroft had reminded them of Wilson's trip. They can't attack Scowcroft without undermining one of the key lies that makes up their defense strategy.

In any case, I suspect that these attacks on Bush are a pre-emptive attack against the shitstorm Rove will unleash as soon as he gets indicted. So perhaps they're just smart politics.

Update: I'm wrong about Scowcroft's timing. He'd have preferred the timing did not coincide with his article, according to Steve Clemons.

I happen to know that Scowcroft did not know that the article was coming out this week and would have preferred his views to air some time after a week of potential indictments by Patrick Fitzgerald of White House heavyweights.

Comments

[DemFromCT]

I commented on an earlier thread about two women in trouble: Judy Miller and Harriet Miers. Nothing remarkable that they're female, but what is remarkable is that in the last week or two, too close association with the Bush Administration has turned from advantageous to radioactive. And next week?

How'd you like to be the next nominee that Bush supports for the SCOTUS if Miers is pulled? if Bush gives you a nickname, your futures trading is going to take a hit.

When Abramoff starts to sing, even more so.

[al-Fubar]

Scowcroft's article almost certainly IS part of the whipping that Junior has coming from Poppy.

-- Rick

[DemFromCT]

from andrew sullivan, from the Sunday Times:

Did Libby do something his boss was unaware of? We don’t know. Would Libby shield Cheney? We don’t know that either. Then there is the question of who might have contradicted Libby’s or Rove’s accounts. It could be anyone in the bureacracy for all we know. But we found out last week from The Washington Post that none other than Colin Powell has been questioned by the prosecutor. It was the Powell angle that led to the political-barometric drop in DC last week. Powell is still seething over his United Nations humiliation on WMD intelligence.

He may have scores to settle. Rove and Libby would be prime targets, with Cheney looming behind them.

What we are witnessing in Washington may be the sudden collapse of discipline within the Bush administration, past and present. The factions that fought over the Iraq war are re-emerging — but this time in public and under oath.

what seems clearer, as per Frank Rich, and Stevenson/jehl and others, is that this is about the war and what the WH is hiding. That may not be a crime as defined by Fitz, but the WH is going to take shit over this like they've never been handed shit before. And deservedly so.

[saugatak]

Well . . . it's not exactly news to anyone that Fitz's investigation was ultimately about the war.

[saugatak]

This is probably pretty obvious to everyone also, but I'll say it anyway. Scowcroft speaking out against the war (as Bush I's agent) and ripping into Cheney (formerly Bush I's DoD Sec. and now Bush II's VP and agent) is Bush I's way of ripping into Bush II.

How did the apple fall so far from the tree?

[obsessed]

I'm truly baffled by this Bush family in-fighting. They couldn't be so dysfunctional as to argue this in public through surrogates, so it has to be either:

1) some elaborate game of spin & damage control
2) Scowcroft and Wilkerson betraying Bush I

[DemFromCT]

saugatak, you've got to step back and look at the non-political junkie and how this is being perceived by the rest of the country. What's been obvious to you and me for years has never been obvious to everyone. When you have story after story after story repeating the obvious it becomes part of the CW, the narrative. That narrative is out of the control of the WH.

Whereas, we will be satisfied with indictments, this narrative puts into perspective what it means if all Fitz charges is perjury and nothing more, or if Judy Miller gets fired without explanation.

Don't miss the forest for the trees.

[saugatak]

Dem, maybe you're right. What's obvious to you and me might not be obvious to the "average" person. After all, they bought the Bush administration's BS when they voted W back into the office.

But an investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame, which outing was motivated by a desire to discredit her husband for revealing the lies told to justify the war seems . . . well, pretty connected to the war.

I guess it all depends on whether the average person realized the connection between outing Plame and Wilson's discrediting the Bush Administration. In any case, if your average voter didn't make the connection before, he/she probably has by now.

@obsessed: If you're right and Scowcroft is not acting as Bush I's surrogate, then Scowcroft is basically pissing on Bush II without Bush I's approval. Such an action would have the effect of putting him on the shitlists of a sitting Prez and a well-regarded ex-Prez.

I just can't imagine someone as smart as Scowcroft doing something so suicidal, my guess is Bush I must have tacitly approved. But you know, in this whole Iraq-Plame matter, so many very intelligent people have acted pretty dumb, so it's possible that Scowcroft may have reached the point where he says, I can't take it anymore, I'm going to say my piece and since I'm close to 80, what can they do to me anyway?

I also think Bush I really may be infuriated at Cheney and Rumsfeld. They all worked together in the Ford White House and were rivals/colleagues. Bush I must know that Bush II isn't the brightest bulb in the room, and thought that with old hands like Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Scowcroft protege Rice that Bush II would be in good hands. Instead, Cheney and Rumsfeld pushed Bush II into a disaster.

Maybe the message Papa Bush is trying to send is, I trusted you guys to take care of my idiot son and you've completely screwed things up. In other words, Bush II is just a "friendly fire" casualty of the attack on Cheney and Rumsfeld.

I think there is one key lesson to be drawn out of this mess: Never let a greedy old bastard with tons of Halliburton stock make military decisions.

[DemFromCT]

saugatak, i draw your attention to this earlier-in-the week post from Howie Kurtz, whose job it is to constantly read the media:

I've been trying to figure out why the Judy Miller saga has become so all-consuming for so many people (ed. note: next time, just post the Q on TNH. It's only a nickel). ...

Then it hit me. It's the war, of course. We're re-fighting the war through this case.

Duh. But, I submit, typical. And this was on OCT. 18.

[MarkC]

Of course Bush I is upset.

Have you ever seen a parent get angry at a babysitter who allowed their charge to get a boo-boo on the playground? There is no fury like that, because it is both protectiveness for the child and guilt at not haveing been minding the child mixed together.

[emptywheel]

MarkC

Nice description there. Although I suspect in the Bush family's case there's also the fear that Bush will endanger the Bush family stature. It's not a family of a lot of love. Rather, it's a family that seeks to maintain maximum value for their family cache.

[Sally Strope]

Bush the Elder would rather see the country go down in flames than to see it happen to Bush the Younger. No matter what lame-brain idea Dear Leader follows, Pappy quickly comes to his defense. The old missus would tongue whip him to death if he did otherwise.

[CCJ]

"So Scowcroft is--at the very least--witness to the fact that someone in the Administration knew about Wilson well before his July 6 2003 article."

I'm puzzled by the inference you've drawn from the fact that Scowcroft allegedly brought a copy of Wilson's 2002 San Jose Mercury News column to the Administration's attention. Given that Wilson had served the first Bush Administration & had been praised by Bush I, wouldn't virtually everyone in the current Administration have "known about Wilson" already? The fact that Wilson -- like many others -- wrote cautionary public pieces about going to war doesn't strike me as having much to do with his later NYTimes Op-Ed piece in 2003, which seems to have triggered the Plame outing (the specific disclosures in the 2003 piece, if not the piece itself). I just don't see any significance to Scowcroft having passed the 2002 column on to the White House, beyond the cordiality that existed on the one hand between Scowcroft and Wilson, and on the other between Scowcroft and the White House.

But, like many people, I'll look forward to reading the Scowcroft piece.

[emptywheel]

CCJ

Frankly, I think it's clear that Cheney and Condi knew of Wilson by February 2002. But they claim they don't. To sustain that claim, they have to pretend that they couldn't put together the former ambassador quoted in Kristof's first article and the prominent critic. Which, in turn, would only be plausible if they hadn't taken special notice of Wilson before May 2003. Which, given Scowcroft's attention, we know to be false, at least with someone in Condi's office.

Remember, the date we may be looking at is March, not July. If Cheney started going after Wilson in March, it probably had a lot more to do with a few comments on CNN (which is all Wilson had said at that point). I'm just trying to show that their plausible deniability gets a lot weaker when you consider Scowcroft's role.

[saugatak]

DemCT, I forgot about your earlier post, and re-reading it, I concede the point. There are a lot of people who are probably only realizing now that this whole thing is ultimately about the war and the catastrophic blunders and mistakes that have brought us to this disaster.

The failure to make this obvious connection may not be due to the "duh" factor . . . I think people just don't want to believe that America, the land of the free, has acted in a way no different than any other imperialistic power . . . they feel betrayed and don't want to admit it.

Emptywheel, I think your point that Cheney and Condi knew about Wilson's POV through Scowcroft and other Bush I people is right on. The WHIGs, the neocons and the Cheney group were extremely focused on anything and everything to do with Iraq. And now we're hearing about how meticulous Libby was in preparing dossiers on Wilson. I can't see how Wilson would be coming off radar to the WHIGs under these circumstances.

[Jackmormon]

The other thing to keep in mind is that the reporting for this New Yorker piece will probably go back a number of months, at least. Maybe there's a hook into the current investigations, but Scowcroft will have been talking and interviewing and letting the reporter tag along for a while.

[JO]

What about the fellow who happened to talk to Novak on the street about Plame, days before his original column? Could this, too, have been Scowcroft?

[emptywheel]

JO

Yeah, I think it quite possible it's Scowcroft (I believe I've said it before, only not here). Consider:

• This person must be either a Republican or a journalist (probably both) or Novak wouldn't have felt free to spill his beans.

• This person must be fairly famous, someone Novak would be able to approach without really knowing him.

• This person must not have an obvious link to Wilson (although Novak would be stupid in this case for forgetting Wilson's canonization by Forty-One).

So yeah, this could be Scowcroft, in which case he definitely testified. But it could also be many other people.