"Don’t Eat the Yellowcake" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Don’t Eat the Yellowcake

Robert Novak is refusing to divulge who told him that the former State Department official who said Niger wasn’t selling yellowcake to Saddam was married to a CIA operative. That’s confusing on the face, but let’s parse it because this scandal seems to point to the sanctum inner mostest at the White House.

Joseph Wilson is the former ambassador to Gabon. In June of 2002, at the request of the CIA, he went to Niger to investigate rumors that they were selling nuclear weapons material to Saddam Hussein. He reported that they weren’t, and the international agency overseeing publically debunked the notion.

The Bush Administration, however, continued to report the information as fact. In fact, Bush used that rumor as the foundation for the allegation in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq was an imminent nuclear threat.

Because Wilson effectively blew up the idea that Saddam was a threat, he was attacked by a leak to Novak; an apparent act of revenge. The leak was that Valerie Plame -- Wilson’s wife -- was an undercover CIA operative specializing in weapons of mass destruction. That leak was supposed to undermine Wilson’s credibility, somehow, but the disclosure backfired.

To leak such information is not only very illegal, but might well have jeopardized lives and compromised national security. I’m not trying to make more out of this than it was, but there are some matters, even in Washington, that aren’t supposed to be used purely for domestic political gains, and the identity of CIA agents is one of them.

Novak is refusing to tell who told him, though some wags think it was Karl Rove, the contemptible mastermind behind the puppet president. The White House denies complicity though from everything that’s been written about the man it seems that Rove, who has frequently demonstrated a commensurate lack of scruples, could have pushed this puck over the leak line.

Should Novak own up? Might this not be like keeping Daniel Ellsburg’s name out of the media when the Pentagon Papers story broke? I don’t think so. Ellsburg revealed documents that belied the lies of the Nixon Administration regarding Vietnam. It was clearly in our national interest to know that Nixon was deceiving the American public about our involvement there.

In this case, Wilson reported in a piece in The New York Times this past July that the White House had lied about the nuke information, and now he says that Rove himself condoned the leak of his wife’s name. How he knows, I don’t. The Bushies say there is no need for a special investigation, what with their own Justice Department investigating. Uh-huh.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.