In 2003, right-wing lapdog Robert Novak published in his column the name of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose husband had written a New York Times Op-Ed piece criticizing Bush's assertion that Iraq had purchased uranium from Africa. Soon after, Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time Magazine, wrote a piece investigating who leaked Plame's name to Novak, only to have that article become the catalyst for a court battle between him and the U.S. government - one that ultimately resulted this week in him having to divulge the confidential sources he used to write his story to the special prosecutor investigating the entire incident.
It should be noted that after the leak, President Bush was quoted by every single news source in the United States as saying that anyone in his administration found to have had a part in the leak would be fired on the spot and handed over to the proper authorities. But just this week, when the world learned that the confidential source was none other than President Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove, what was the administrations' response?
Total silence.
Not only was Rove in talks with Cooper about his article, but he was also directly involved in a phone conversation with Robert Novak, in which he explicitly doled out Plame's name - which, because Plame was an undercover CIA agent, is a federal offense. And now everyone from the president all the way down to the press secretary is backtracking on statements they made about the repercussions that would find the person responsible for the leak.
It's outrageous that the Bush administration is now all of a sudden going silent on this issue when it was previously so vocal about it, especially after trying to send a reporter to prison for reporting on it. What happened to all that talk about the person responsible for the leak being fired? What happened to upholding the law? What about the fact that when reporters in the White House Press Corps accused Rove of leaking Plame's name in 2003, Scott McClennan said that was "simply not true?"
From weapons of mass destruction to secret memos about Osama Bin Laden's plans to attack within the United States to breaking international law on prisoners' treatment, the administration is trying desperately to keep us in the dark about what they're doing, all while continuing to tell us that they are working to spread freedom and every other buzzword used on post-9/11 bumper stickers. When I was a kid, I remember the same thing happening to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz - she was warned not to pay any attention to the little man behind the curtain in the Emerald City. She found out that the magic she believed in and was counting on to help her was nothing more than an illusion, and that's exactly what the administration is trying to keep all of us from seeing.
As we all know, Dorothy eventually uncovered the fact that the Wizard was just an ordinary man, and that all of his power was nothing more than a myth. The real magic in the story was in fact within Dorothy all along. Now, we may not have national ruby slippers of our own, but here in the United States, the same is true for all of us. Our laws give us the freedom to question, protest and investigate our government to the full extent of the law if we deem it necessary, making it just as easy for us to uncover the same kinds of lies here that abounded in Oz.
Republicans today continue to lie to us, and it's appalling that many U.S. citizens continue to believe that our current government works for us, when the administration's actions in this erupting scandal clearly prove otherwise. What we have is a White House bent on pandering to a specific group of people, perpetuating party rhetoric, and undermining the Constitution by using these tactics as a means to achieve Republican ends. If you don't believe me, just look at the fact that on any given day on C-Span you can see ridiculous showings of Republican disdain for the democratic process, like shutting off the microphones and lights on Democrats in committee sessions. Or how about just the fact that Bush only assigned a special prosecutor to the Plame case after letting then-Attorney General John Ashcroft sit on the case for months with no real progress being made?
According to the New York Times, today the Bush administration is classifying documents at rate of 125 per minute in an effort to keep them from the public. If you add that to the fact that they are also keeping mum on Rove's fate in the face of his growing involvement in this scandal, then what you have is a recipe for what Thomas Jefferson once termed in the Declaration of Independence "a long train of abuses and usurpations." Luckily for us, Jefferson also told us what to do in those kinds of situations, saying that, for the U.S. public, "it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Now, I'm not saying that President Bush needs to be overthrown in a grandiose coup d'etat, but he did once promise us that we would see justice done in the White House when the truth on the current leak scandal was revealed, and we have yet to. Perhaps one day, the U.S. public will wake up and smell the poppies and realize that what they have come to believe about their beloved leader is nothing more than good pyrotechnics and some bad lighting. The president and his men are not working in our best interest. I only hope that I won't have to click my heels three times for the rest of the United States to see that.
Adrian Muniz '07 is convinced that the "W" in Bush's name actually stands for "wicked."
