Garrison Keillor is good for the soul

July 26, 2005 | I feel it's time for me to step forward and tell what I know about Karl Rove's conversation with columnist Robert Novak in which Novak reportedly told Rove that CIA operative Valerie Plame had been responsible for her husband Joseph Wilson's going to Niger to debunk the White House's claim that Saddam Hussein was shopping for uranium in Africa to make nuclear weapons and that's why we invaded Iraq, and Rove said, "Yes, I've heard that, too." Rove has been accused of revealing the identity of a covert intelligence officer. This simply isn't true.

I happened to be in Rove's office when the phone rang. I was there on behalf of my publisher, to see if Rove knows enough to make him worth a $6 million advance on his memoirs. (Answer: Not really.) He picked up the phone, and the voice at the other end sounded like a rat trapped in a coffee can. "Novak," whispered Rove, and he pretended to stick a finger down his throat. He listened for several minutes. "Yes, I've heard that, too," he said.

As he spoke to Novak, Rove wrote on a notepad, "Rosebud knows" -- "Rosebud" being Vice President Cheney's code name -- and winked at me.

This raised a question in my mind: Did Rove know Plame had taken the identity of Cheney during an arrhythmia episode at Walter Reed and that a heavily sedated vice president had been flown by the CIA to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as Plame donned a latex-padded suit and took his place? She quickly discovered that the uranium was stored at the Whitewater property once owned by the Clintons and then deeded to Kofi Annan and used as a supply depot for black helicopters. She tried to warn Bill Clinton, and the next day he had that mysterious "bypass" operation, after which he suddenly got chummy with ex-CIA chief George H.W. Bush and the two flew off to Southeast Asia like in an old Bing Crosby/Bob Hope "Road" picture.

New York Times columnist William Safire was the first to spot the womanly tenderness in the vice president's eyes, and he called Lynne Cheney to ask if Rosebud had been infiltrated. She denied everything. She also said she had "never been happier."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/07/26/plame_affair/index.html

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