The Intimidation of Ambassador Wilson and Ms. Plame and 76 Days.

By Lloyd Hart

Considering it was the corporate media that published Bob Novak's column that outed Ms. Plame as a "CIA operative" in order to punish and intimidate her husband, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson for not playing ball with the Bush regime, how can anybody expect the corporate media to now report objectively about a conspiracy the corporate media participated in. It was 76 days ago that the conspiracy was hatched in Bob Novak's and three other reporters articles, a conspiracy that most likely came from the office within the White House belonging to Karl Rove.

As William Rivers Pitt points out in his article www.truthout.org/docs_03/093003A.shtml "Karl Rove, senior political advisor to George W. Bush, is a very powerful man. That is not to say he has never been in trouble. Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush Sr. campaign for trashing Robert Mosbacher, Jr., who was the chief fundraiser for the campaign and an avowed Bush loyalist. Rove accomplished this trashing of Mosbacher by planting a negative story with columnist Bob Novak. The campaign figured out that Karl had done the dirty deed, and he was given his walking papers." .

I'm not surprised that a federally indictable crime can go 76 days without action considering Katherine Harris and Jeb Crow, I mean Jeb Bush are not in jail for ethnically cleansing the voter list in Florida in 2000. But the corporate media and the Bush regime obviously didn't do the dance they should have done when the Bob Novak article was first published. Which is to get out ahead of the story, a normal Karl Rove practice. Instead all parties chose to ignore the story because in fact, it was an intimidation tactic to chill the air of criticism of the Bush regime's lies and deceit the regime used to advance the preemption policy in the National Security Strategy to invade Iraq as part of the war on terrorism or as I call it, the war to seize control of the strategical oil supply.

The corporate media is still soft peddling this issue. On the front-page of todays October 1st. Boston Globe, an article entitled "Criminal probe of the CIA leak launched." in the very first paragraph it states " a Bush administration official exposed the identity of a CIA officer to "embarrass" her husband, a former Ambassador critical of the U.S. rationale for going to war in Iraq". First of all there are several things wrong with the language within this paragraph. Why would the Bush regime want to "embarrass" Ambassador Wilson by exposing the identity of his wife and her position at CIA? After all I am sure that he is very proud of his spouses career. I've heard this word "embarrass" being used by CNN and several other networks to describe what the Bush regime did to Ambassador Wilson and his spouse. By using the word "embarrass" the corporate media is soft peddling the issue, buying time for the regime to get out ahead of the story, when the word that should be used is "intimidation". Intimidation is of course is even more serious than the crime of outing a CIA operative for it exhibits a broad premeditated conspiracy hatched from within the White House that reaches out to the corporate media. Robert Novak claimed himself that he was told by the CIA not to print Ms. Plame's identity in his column but chose to do it anyway. Mr. Novak's excuse for going ahead with outing Ms. Plame in his column was that the CIA didn't tell him why he shouldn't print Ms. Plame's name. Mr. Novak has shown his hand in this conspiracy by consciously going against the CIA's ruling in the matter. I'm not sure whether Mr. Novak can claim confidential sources when he himself has knowingly violated the law.

In fact, Ambassador Wilson was simply doing his job to prevent the Bush regime from embarrassing itself by going to Africa and disproving the Niger/Iraq uranium claim. By not caring and sweeping aside the evidence of the Ambassador Wilson's trip to Africa the Bush regime is now involved in the embarrassing and criminal task of covering up the federally indictable crime it has committed.

76 days is what happens when the corporate media is handed a grotesque monopoly of all media markets in America, as it was on June 2nd of this year, by the Bush regime. The Bush regime in the quid quo pro is given the slack it needs to get out ahead of a story. One of the worst practices that has come out of this incestuous relationship between the Bush regime and the corporate media is the ignoring the violation of Americans First Amendment rights by the Bush regime and the Secret Service, in the creation of protest zones that are placed so far away from wherever George Bush happens to be such as airports, campaign stops and fund-raisers and the allowing only friendly crowds where the public has every right to congregate. Not to mention the coverage of the peace movement and the outright lying of and by the corporate media about the real numbers of people that showed up at protests against the war on Iraq. There was also the under to nonexistent reporting of the denying of a march permit to the peace group United for Peace and Justice for a march that was to take place on Febuary 15th. of this year. The crimes of a corporate media in relationship to the Bush regime go back to even prior to election 2000 and are too many to list here but the picture of the criminal conspiracy that exists between the Bush regime and the corporate media is very clear and unmistakable in the Wilson/Plame intimidation conspiracy.

The only reason the Wilson/Plame story was kept alive all these 76 days is thanks to the alternative media outlets in America such as Democracy Now hosted by Amy Goodman ( www.democracynow.org ) . Even Jon Stewart of the Daily Show interviewed Ambassador Wilson on this matter on the cable channel, Comedy Central in July. But we also have to thank Ambassador Wilson and Ms. Plame for staying further out in front by being the patriotic whistle blowers that everyone in the U.S. federal government and America can look up to.