So it looks as if Karl Rove actually did it. President Bush's top
strategist purportedly leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie
Plame to the press in an attempt to discredit former Ambassador Joseph
Wilson, who had criticized the Bush Administration's faulty claim that
Saddam Hussein was going nuclear.

The latest revelation that Karl Rove served as Matt Cooper's inside guy
thrills many liberals in Washington. Senator John Kerry and Hilary
Clinton, along with several other top Democrats, have all called on Bush
to fire Rove for threatening our national security by outing a CIA
operative. David Corn declared in The Nation that Rove acted "in a
reckless and cavalier fashion, ignoring national security interests to
score a political point against a policy foe." The White House press
corps is also up in arms over Press Secretary Scott McClellan's blatant
lies, as he assures them repeatedly that the leak did not originate
within the White House.

It's all a bunch of liberal hoopla, however. Despite Rove's political
motivations for leaking Plame to the press, we shouldn't be so quick to
dub him a traitor, or even call for his firing over the leak. Sure Rove
should be hauled off to the pen for
helping propagate Bush's illegal war on Iraq -- but he should also be
commended for outing an undercover CIA agent, no matter how inadvertent
his good deed may have been.

That's right. I don't share the liberals' admiration for the Central
Intelligence Agency. But I think it is important to note the broader
context of the alleged Rove leak. Unlike most mindless punditry's take
on the matter, Rove's move was not just a personal tit-for-tat aimed at
Joseph Wilson, but part of a larger White House effort to counter
increasing CIA rumblings about the short sightedness of Bush's Iraq
endeavor. Thus some might say that Plame should not have been leaked to
the press. But the fact is the CIA, besides its potential "good deeds,"
has for far too long served as the front for US supremacy across the
globe, as well as at home.

The numerous actions the CIA has taken since 1945 have been guilty,
either directly or indirectly, of helping remove dozens of governments
from power - many of which were democratically elected.

According to William Blum, author of "Rogue State": "From 1945 to the
end of the [20th] century, the USA attempted to overthrow more than 40
foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist
movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the
USA caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned
many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

The CIA of course, played an integral role in all of these bloody coups.
In 1949 the CIA successfully helped to change the government in Syria,
as well as in Greece that same year. They did the same in Cuba in 1952
and Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, South Vietnam in 1955, Haiti in
1957, Laos in 1958, South Korea and Ecuador in 1960, the Dominican
Republic and Honduras in 1963, Brazil and Bolivia in 1964, Zaire in
1965, Ghana in 1966, Cambodia in 1970, El Salvador in 1972, Chile in
1973, South Korea in 1979, Liberia in 1980, Chad in 1982, Grenada in
1983, Fiji in 1987,

Venezuela in 2002 and Haiti in 2004. And this only represents a list of
"successful" US interventions. Many others have failed. Let us not
overlook what the CIA has done here in the United States under the guise
of "national security."

As the late journalist Gary Webb exposed in the mid-1990s, right-wing
drug dealers in Latin America helped finance a CIA-backed covert war in
Nicaragua by selling loads of cocaine to street gangs in Los Angeles,
who then turned the pale powder into crack and distributed it throughout
poor black neighborhoods nationwide.

But the CIA's narcotics dealings didn't begin in the 1990s - the CIA's
drug propagation dates back at least to 1947 in Afghanistan, as
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair explain in their seminal book,
"Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press.
<http://www.easycarts.net/ecarts/CounterPunch/CP_Books.html>"

Back in the 1960s the CIA, along with the FBI, routinely used "mail
covers" (the recording of names and addresses) and electronic
surveillance in order to spy on activists in the anti-war and civil
rights movements. The CIA alone admitted to photographing the outside of
2.7 million pieces of mail during those years, as well as opening more
than 214,000.

Right now, as Professor David Price recently exposed in CounterPunch,
the CIA places covert agents in American university classrooms to spy on
students and faculty. And this is just the tip of the iceberg regarding
the CIA's invasive and violent history in the US.

So you'll have to excuse me if I think Karl Rove did us all a favor by
outing Valerie Plame. We can only hope more Beltway insiders follow his
lead.

*Joshua Frank* is the author of the brand new book, Left Out!: How
Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, which has just been published by
Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discounted rate at
www.brickburner.org <http://www.brickburner.org/>. Joshua can be reached
at Joshua@brickburner.org <mailto:Joshua@brickburner.org>.