Protestors outside and in Duke University’s Page Auditorium met Karl Rove’s visit with a reminder of what the Bush Administration has done to human rights. One person simulated the torture technique known as “waterboarding,” when a captive is drowned just short of death.
Inside the auditorium, Rove fielded soft ball questions tossed by former Bush adviser and political science professor Peter Feaver. Things got more heated when Feaver opened the floor to questions. As reported in the student newspaper, when asked about torture, Rove answered:
“Torture is not acceptable,” he said. “The U.S. is a signatory to agreements on torture, and we will not torture. We do not torture.” He added that the U.S. government need not fully disclose its actions to the American public.
Either Bush’s brain is sadly misinformed or deliberately lying. Or, I suppose, he supports — or perhaps thought up? — the strategy of narrowing the definition of torture so that nothing the US does fits anymore. This would fit, since Rove is all about spin, not uncomfortable facts.
As David Corn points out in his Mother Jones blog, Rove is a serial fabulist (the English major in me). In a recent appearance on the Charlie Rose show, Corn wrote, Rove:
claimed disingenuously that congressional Democrats in 2002, not the Bush White House, pushed for a pre-election vote on a resolution authorizing George W. Bush to attack Iraq. This comment kicked up a controversy. But in one portion of the Rose interview cut out of the TV-edit that appeared, Rove tossed out another whopper. This excerpt was posted by the Charlie Rose show on YouTube, and it covers questions Rose posed to Rove regarding former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s recent hullabaloo-causing statement about a key episode in the CIA leak case. If you just awoke from a coma, McClellan said,
I…publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. There was one problem. It was not true. I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration “were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the president himself.
Rove claimed to Rose that McClellan had emailed him a few notes maintaining that these few sentences had been misinterpreted. Rove added that he would not have anything else to say on this until a “more full disclosure” appears in McClellan’s book, which is scheduled to be published next spring. But Rove went on to insist that he had not misled McClellan, and he claimed total innocence:
I did not knowingly disclose the identity or name of a CIA agent.
Wait a minute. Let’s look at an email (first disclosed by Michael Isikoff of Newsweek) that Matt Cooper, then a Time correspondent, sent to his editors on July 11, 2003–three days before the name and CIA employment of Valerie Plame Wilson was first disclosed in a column by Robert Novak.
In this note, Cooper wrote:
Spoke to Rove [this morning] on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation…his big warning…don’t get too far out on [Joe] Wilson…says that the DCIA [Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet] didn’t authorize the [Wilson] trip [to Niger to check out the allegation Saddam Hussein had shopped for uranium there] and that Cheney didn’t authorize the trip. It was, KR said, wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues, who authorized the trip.
Given that neither Cooper nor the American public knew at this time that former Ambassador Joe Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA–where she was operations chief for a classified unit searching for intelligence on Iraq’s WMDs–Rove was indeed disclosing to a reporter that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer. Perhaps he did not know precisely what her position was at the CIA. But he was outing her to Cooper as a CIA employee. It just so happened that Cooper ended up being scooped by Novak.