Editorial: Officials’ motive was revenge

Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2003 | 8:55 a.m.

Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador to Iraq and an expert on African issues, in July refuted President Bush's pre-war claims that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium ore from Africa. Wilson knew what he was writing about when, in an opinion piece published in The New York Times, he contradicted one of Bush's reasons for going to war with Iraq. It was Wilson who, at the request of the Bush administration, had gone to Africa last year but found no evidence that uranium ore had been sought by Iraq to develop a nuclear weapons program. Just a week after Wilson's stinging commentary appeared, he and his wife were the targets of retribution by some obviously embarrassed members of the administration. Conservative columnist Robert Novak quoted two anonymous senior administration officials as saying that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative who had been working on iss ues related to weapons of mass destruction. The officials implied that he only received the assignment because of his wife'! s connections.

Even worse, in revealing the name of Wilson's wife, the officials very likely broke a federal law that prohibits identifying federal intelligence operatives. They possibly jeopardized her safety and that of her contacts. Over the weekend a senior administration official acknowledged to The Washington Post that the two leakers had tried to interest at least six other journalists in the story and that their effort to "out" Wilson's wife "was meant purely and simply for revenge." This administration, which has tried to turn national security into a partisan issue, has shown in the past that it's not above political cheap shots -- no matter what their consequences are. In this instance we don't know yet whether it was revenge by just a couple of officials acting on their own or whether it was an orchestrated attempt by high-level officials in the administratio n.

The Justice Department has begun a criminal investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of the name of Wilson's wife, but Attorney General John Ashcroft has so politicized his office that we worry he's not up to the task. Republican leaders in Congress have spent a lot of time covering for this administration's mistakes, but this is an instance where they need to thoroughly investigate this egregious action and make it clear that no one in the Bush administration is above the law.