No, not Kim Novak. Robert Novak. Remember him? The frothing mad dog right wing "commentator" with a regular TV perch on the McLaughlin Group* (for a long time a GE-sponsored show- GE was the SOLE sponsor, the same corporation that brought us Ronald Reagan) and a permanent newspaper column which he used to commit a blatant criminal act- to wit, a violation of the Agent Identities Protection Act. He's the guy who named for all the world to hear the identity of an undercover CIA operations officer by the name of Valerie Plame.
Well, you know what happened to Novak! Openly flouting a Federal criminal law like that!
Nothing. That's what happened.
John Kiriakou, former CIA officer, gave a reporter a lead on someone to talk to in an email. He named a CIA officer in that email, that was seen by nobody but the reporter, and the name was never published.
So Kiriakou had to cut a plea deal and is off to the Federal slammer for the next 30 months. He leaves behind a wife, 5 young children, and close to a million bucks in legal debts. (Pointless since there's no defense these days in Federal courts in "national security" cases- see the interview with Kiriakou for details at democracynow.org for January 30, 2013.)
My point? Well, it's not one I haven't made before. Just another example of the political nature of the U.S. legal (aka "Justice"-sic!) system. How tiresome I've become.
There seems to be a pattern. Right wingers have impunity or near-impunity. James O'Keefe, the video slanderer, caught red-handed in a U.S. Senator's office trying to wiretap the phones- not even a charge! Bill O'Reilly, inciting the assassination of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller- not even scolded by anyone in the bourgeois media! (Contrsat with jihadist propagandists subject to U.S. assassination. And that fellow in Boston who completely on his own translated Al-Qaeda tracts sentenced to 17 years for that and nothing more.) Anti-abortion terrorists can get away with anything short of outright murder. The FBI doesn't consider them terrorists- anti-war activists and Occupy movement people are "terrorists" to the FBI. And so on and on and on. (Did I mention that pretenses to the contrary, the U.S. is a right-wing country and has been one for almost the entirety of its history? Contrary to the delusory ravings of reactionaries about the "Liberal Establishment." If only there were such a thing! Maybe they mean the Philharmonic and art museums. They seem to resent high culture.)
Novak blew Plame's cover to carry out the Bush regime's revenge against her husband, Joseph Wilson, who had the efffontery to point out the falsity of the regime's claims about yellowcake uranium from Niger going to Iraq under Saddam Hussein, a key fabrication used to drum up the hysterical war fever necessary for the U.S. aggression to be carried out. (Remember Bush-Powell-Rice saying things like "we can't wait for the proof in the form of a mushroom cloud"? They meant over a U.S. city. Those terrorists just blew up the Twin Towers! And Saddam Hussein is connected to Al-Qaeda! [Not really.] Ultimately one of VP Cheney's henchmen, I. Lewis "scooter" Libby, was convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to Federal agents. (This is why you should NEVER, EVER talk to Federal agents. That's how they got Martha Stewart and Tonya Harding too- lying to Federal agents. They can lie to you, of course. But you're facing 5 years in prison per lie if you lie to them.Why would you agree to compete on such an uneven playing field? Plus the Government is the referee!)
Libby, like Kiriakou, was sentenced to 30 months, but unlike Kiriakou didn't have to do a day in jail since Bush immediately commuted the prison term. Kind of like how his father pardoned all the Iran-contra criminals to immunize them. Guess protecting right-wing conspirators runs in the family.
The Agent Identities Protection Act was passed as an attack on the righteous publications Counterspy and Covert Action Information Bulletin, which exposed CIA crimes against humanity and tried to enable victims of the CIA in other countries to protect themselves by being able to identify CIA officers pretending to be diplomats in foreign countries. (Adversary "intelligence services" of course know exactly who the CIA officers are.) The law criminalized publishing their names. Apparently private emails constitute "publishing" these days.
*The McLaughlin group had as its ringmaster a reactionary from National Review, one John McLaughlin, a former Jesuit, and a crew of 3 other Beltway reactionaries and one sane person, the world-weary Jack Germond who made rational comments, and consisted of a lot of yelling, yelling which illuminated the mentality of the Empire's political elite, for those interested in studying such things. These days Patrick Buchanan and the billionaire Zionist fanatic Mortimer Zuckerman are on the panel, and Eleanor Clift has to hold up the "liberal" (i.e. non-deranged) side of the arguments. Before he died, Novak was a regular, along with the loathsome and smug reactionary Morton Kondracke. McLaughlin is still the "host."
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