A Nutty Little Argument

Sometimes I swear that Christopher Hitchens must be filming a boring PBS spin-off of Punk’d. What kind of a man responds to the exposure of a CIA agent by attacking the law that makes it illegal to expose CIA agents?

It’s a little rude to call arguments “self-refuting”, but I don’t know of a more appropriate term for this. It’s a terminally dishonest piece of work, and an embarassment to Slate. In the middle of sliming Wilson, Plame, and the CIA (“The CIA in general is institutionally committed against the policy of regime change in Iraq”), Hitchens forgets to offer an argument about why the law should be overturned. The reader gets no indication of what protections, if any, undercover CIA operatives are actually warranted. Hitchens just points to a few old New York Times editorials concerned about how the law would affect journalists, believing that Rove’s critics have somehow been hoist by their own petard.

I’d just like to bring one thing up. Hitchens believes that the CIA and Joseph Wilson are to blame, not Rove or anyone in the White House. After all, they failed to find evidence of Saddam’s attempts to buy Nigerean yellowcake, when, says Hitch, “(Niger’s) government, according to unrefuted intelligence-gathering from British and other European intelligence agencies, (was) covertly discussing sanctions-breaking sales of its uranium to a number of outlaw regimes, including that of Saddam Hussein.” But, of course, this intelligence has been refuted. The Iraq Survey Group had the benefit of the occupation of Iraq. They travelled anywhere they liked, interviewed anyone they liked, saw any document they liked. Their conclusion: “ISG has not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material—activities that we believe would have constituted an Iraqi effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program.” So Wilson and the CIA deserve harsh punishment for failure to find evidence of a non-existent program. Sweet.

I know that I should just file Christopher Hitchens under “Boortz” and let it go. I will, soon. With that, I take you to the Fraysters, who are flaying Hitchens:

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(Hitchens wrote) Could it be that there is an element of politicization in all this? That there is more to Mr. Wilson’s perfunctory “no problem” report from Niger than first appears? I would describe this as a fit, if not indeed urgent, subject for public debate.

Indeed, Hitch! It’s about time someone looked into the scandal of a government agent who gets sent into Niger to find evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program. . .and claims he didn’t find any?! And why? Just because an Iraqi nuclear weapons program didn’t exist? Didn’t he get the memo?

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And let’s review the supposed “benefit” to the country of finding out that Ms. Plame was a covert agent. Well, Hitch points out, it shows that the CIA somehow “influenced” Mr. Wilson’s mission. Ah, very suspicious, you might think. Except here’s the thing: it is stated clearly, in the op-ed that started all this, that the mission originated when Cheney asked the CIA to investigate the claims about Niger. So in other words, Hitch’s claim is that by outing Ms. Plame, we found out that the CIA was behind a CIA mission! Thank goodness for Karl Rove! Otherwise we might never have suspected that somebody dispatched by the CIA was…dispatched by the CIA!

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Hitchens then goes on to call the law “unconstitutional” without explanation. Presumably, Hitchens thinks that protecting the identities of covert agents is not enough of a national security concern to find its way into an exception to the First Amendment. Perhaps Hitchens wouldn’t mind if all of government secrets were revealed to our enemies. (The author) knows Hitchens’ position is so absurd there is no need to get into caselaw.

Hitches then suggests “we observe the operation of this law in practice,” but incredibly fails to mention Rove, Libby, Novack, Cooper, Miller or anyone else who may have violated the law, or even the law. Rather, Hitchens attacks the victim, her husband, her employer, her boss, and a foreign government. Oh, Hitchens does pass off Rove’s guilt with an offhand, by-the-way, unsupported sentence which practically begs you to trust his conclusion that Rove is innocent of wrongdoing. (The author) likes evidence.

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I love you Hitch. Really. You’ve been the true loyal opposition by beating liberals’ heads against the wall to explain what Islamofascism means, and why it should be the Left who most violently opposes it and supports the overthrow of the Arab Muslim status quo. Your hero worship of Orwell is fitting. History will show that you were one of the most important, honest and courageous thinkers in the beginning of this long struggle.

But this… Rove protection…is making you sound like a Bush partisan hack. Come on….

Rove leaked. Bush said he’d fire anyone who did. It’s now about Bush and his personal trustworthiness, how much his word to the American people is worth. He has a chance to salvage it a little bit by firing Rove. In the same way that this sorded affair has to do with the Iraq War, Bush’s word has to do with any possible success for the war in Iraq. The people have to trust him. For God’s sake, if he just fired Rove and apologized, he would help bind the country together to stick through this critical fight there. This is a partisan war, because mainly Bush has helped it be one.

Hitch, you actually undermine your eloquent support for knocking off Saddam by this petty defense of the Fat Bald Genius.

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While we’re on the subject of duty, it bears mentioning the obvious risks that CIA employees take on for their service. I say it bears mentioning only because Hitchens is so dismissive of Ms. Plame “as a fairly senior female bureaucrat not involved in risky activity in the field.” (As a threshold matter, why on earth does the fact that Ms. Plame is a “female” make her work less risky? There’s a pretty compelling argument the opposite is true.) Calling Plame a bureaucrat (technically true I suppose because she works, like 100% of all government employees in a bureaucracy) is supposed to be ad hominem, but it is just silly. Plame, as an undercover CIA employee overseas, was a target every time she stepped off a plane (or on one that might be hijacked) anywhere overseas…

And all that does not begin to reach the danger that people working with undercover CIA officials are in. Being seen with a someone who is widely known to be an employee of some more innocuous branch of government than CIA, or an employee of some apparently harmless private company may not be very dangerous to a foreign intelligence asset secretly cooperating with our country’s intelligence services. When that foreign agent’s cohorts learn, though, that he’s been keeping company with the CIA, well, suffice to say the agent’s prospects for a long and healthy life take a significantly dismal downward turn. Again, this is a circumstance that Hitchens must figure is of only passing import, and, if you’re indifferent to our country’s ability to keep its human intelligence assets alive and well, then maybe Hitchens has a point. I don’t think that and if Hitchens is indifferent to the issue, well then the cost of being a political hack is not just his professionalism, but a little bit of his soul.

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First, IIPA is a bad law because it’s egregiously overbroad, not because it’s acceptable to place the names of all our covert operatives on the front page of the news. The Espionage Act, for example, might come into play. Perhaps, under the Administration’s strange interpretation of precedents from military law, the leaker should be sent to Gitmo without having committed a crime. In other words, the act Rove and his friends committed should be and probably is a crime, and it’s only unfortunate that the law most convenient to use is (indeed) a poor one.

Second, even granting that the IIPA is bad law, there isn’t any law criminalizing Oval Office fellatio, and that didn’t stop Clinton from facing perjury charges. It looks like Administration officials lied under oath before the grand jury, either to save their jobs or to further the conspiracy to smear Wilson, Plame, and the opposition to the war.

Finally, Hitchens seems to sense the bankruptcy of this argument because he falls back on the attempt to prove that Wilson, although his report agrees with facts on the ground, is wrong, and the hysterical “mushroom cloud” warnings [lunaville.com] of the Administration were correct. We have searched Iraq up-and-down without finding any signs of yellowcake acquisition on that end and without finding any program that could utilize yellowcake even if it fell from the sky as a gift. To use a phrase that might awaken one of Hitchens’ now-repressed memories: he is accusing Wilson of being a premature anti-yellowcakist. Like the premature anti-fascists, Wilson should wear this label with pride.