Republicans and Independents for Impeaching Bush and Cheney

On July 22, 2005, Special Forces Colonel Patrick Lang said before a congressional committee that, as a result of the exposure of Valerie Plame, our ability to know when terrorists would “carry 10-pound bags of explosive in subway stations” would “go right down the drain.” The media never reported this. Instead it was chasing the spin that Plame was not “really” a covert agent. It was crucial to the White House that Plame’s job description be fogged up.

Scott McClellan now says not only Karl Rove and Scooter Libby told him to lie about their involvement in the Plame betrayal but Vice President Cheney, presidential Chief of Staff Andrew Card and President Bush himself.

At the time of the leak even right-wing talkingheads were saying this was one scandal from which the administration might not recover. Playing hardball with critics like Joe Wilson was one thing. Exposing an undercover informant network was another. Although many details about Plame’s career are still classified, we know she was a non-proliferation specialist, another way of saying her job consisted of tracing the spread and movement of weapons of mass destruction. If she was only a bureaucrat, why would a Special Forces Colonel like Lang sit before a committee under oath and say that stripping Plame’s cover was an “assault” on our ability to prevent terrorist attack? Was everyone but the White House lying?

Within hours of her exposure, every hostile intelligence service in the world had run Plame’s name through its databases, according to a former diplomat quoted in the Washington Post. That would include Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, ISI, which we know is shot through with Al Qaeda sympathizers, and which protects Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Special Prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald referred to “national security” no less than three times in his first press conference on Plame. Inexplicably, he settled on the lower charge of violation of the Intelligence Identity Act, rather than the higher charge of treason.

Colonel Lang spoke of a violation of “trust” which spread like a “shockwave” among the foreigners who had worked with Plame. When she was exposed, they were exposed too. The message to those who would help us against our enemies was: the Americans cannot be trusted to protect their informants. How can you help people like these from being slaughtered like sheep? They won’t even stand up for people risking their lives for them, not so much Valerie Plame, who as an American agent had some measure of protection, but the foreign informants she had cultivated over 30 years, who had no such measures of protection. Al Qaeda is the big dog in these countries, and if it wants you dead, you are dead.

Bush’s pardon of Libby sent a bigger message: partisan politics trumps everything for Americans. It even trumps their own safety. Make no mistake: this is about our ability to thwart terrorist attack, nothing less.

Plame did her job. She set up a international network of informants over 30 years to help gauge the origin of the next attack. If the recalcitrant congressmen against impeachment on the House Judiciary Committee do not do their jobs, their names shall be on the lips of every American after an attack succeeds which Plame’s blown network might have stopped, and their names shall be Treason. Complicity with treason is treason. Impeaching Cheney, then Bush, will tell the world that we take our intelligence services seriously. In the new world after 9/11, intelligence on a single cargo container sitting in an American port is worth more than battalions of our soldiers floundering around in countries we do not understand. Intelligence is safety.

A blinded giant is a helpless creature prone to attack from every direction. Intelligence is our eyesight.

Congressman Robert Wexler on Judiciary sent out an email saying:

This new evidence from Scott McClellan could be the tipping point but we must move quickly. I will use the McClellan admissions to help convince my colleagues that we must hold impeachment hearings.

Call and fax these Republican congressmen on Judiciary now!