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July 13, 2006

Special Report Roundtable - July 13

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARK REGEV, ISRAELI FOREIGN MINISTRY SPOKESMAN: Anyone who fires deliberately and indiscriminately into an urban area, a large metropolitan area like Haifa has to understand that Israel will act to defend its citizens.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: That a top Israeli official explaining the counteroffensive which is underway now. This follows an attack on the port city of Haifa which is farther away, some thought, than it would be possible for missiles or rockets out of Lebanon to reach. But reach it did. So, the struggle goes on. Some thoughts on this crisis now from Fred Barnes, executive editor of the "Weekly Standard"; Mort Kondracke same job at "Roll Call"; and Mara Liasson national political correspondent at NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO, all are FOX News contributors.

Mara, what about this? What do we know, or what can we -- have we learned really or can we now conclude about this from these events both Gaza and the attacks out of Lebanon?

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: Well, what we know now is that the Islamic groups are in the government, OK, they're not just operating on their own.

(CROSSTALK)

HUME: In fact, it's fair to say in Gaza they are the government.

LIASSON: They are the government in Hezbollah, they're part of the government. They also are more and more coordinated and more and more coordinated with Iran who's causing tremendous problems for the U.S. on a number of fronts. We also know that they are better at doing what they do. That rocket that you just talked about went a longer way. They're capable of hitting farther into Israeli territory and it's a real problem. And, you know, I think the U.S. doesn't have a whole lot of options. It certainly has been pretty staunch in its support of Israel, but as Israel fights back, there's going to be more and more images of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians being killed.

HUME: And perhaps some Israelis as well.

LIASSON: And Israelis as well. And this is -- I think these groups, Hamas and Hezbollah, want to inflict the most possible damage and pain on Israel even if it can't vanquish it militarily.

(CROSSTALK)

HUME: No, let me just stop you there for a second. In the end, which peoples are likely to receive the most damage here, just in terms of deaths and destruction?

LIASSON: Oh, probably the Lebanese and the Palestinians just because Israel has the greater military might.

HUME: So, in what sense is it in their interests that these terrorist acts be carried out?

MORT KONDRACKE, "ROLL CALL": Well, it's partly what they do. They are terrorist groups and they anticipated that the Israelis would hit them back in a measured fashion. Instead, the Israelis are stomping on both Hamas and Hezbollah, and I think it's all-out war against those two enemies which, as Mara says, are getting more and more sophisticated. So, it's in Israel's interest and especially in the interest -- the political interest as well as the Olmert government which is new and untried and all of that to make the statement that they are going to respond to attacks with maximum force. And they're also trying to get the Lebanese at the same time. I mean, there's really two and a half wars going, one against Hamas, one against Hezbollah, all out, and the half is against Lebanon in an effort to try to get the Lebanese to kick or to bring Hezbollah under control the way the Sunnis and the Christians in Lebanon drove out the Syrians successfully. Whether Lebanon has the strength to do that is open to question, probably not.

Israel would be perfectly happy to have the Lebanese army on its border, they know the Lebanese army isn't going to be firing rockets into Israeli cities or Israeli -- places at all. But it's been and, of course, there is a U.N. resolution that says that Hezbollah should be disarmed. Well, they certainly haven't been disarmed they have thousands of these missiles and I don't think the Israelis have had any choice except to do exactly what they're doing now.

HUME: Does this say something about what these organizations and what the Arab neighbors of the Israel want? After all, for years we heard that the problem was the so-called illegal Israeli occupation. These attacks from Gaza and Lebanon are coming from places where Israel ended its occupation.

LIASSON: Right, and in case there it's a sovereign state.

HUME: So what does that tell us?

KONDRACKE: It tells us that when Israel does something good it doesn't count. The enemies of Israel who, after all -- Hamas doesn't just want to control Gaza, it wants to kill Israel. It wants to destroy Israel, Hezbollah the same way. These are Islamic terrorist organizations. They are -- they're both allied.

HUME: In the case of Hamas and to some extent Hezbollah, these are the elected officials of these places.

KONDRACKE: Well, their purpose.

HUME: So what does that mean?

KONDRACKE: .in life -- they will get.

HUME: So what does it tell us about what the Arab neighbors want?

KONDRACKE: Well, the Arab neighbors have not been willing to put these organizations out of commission.

HUME: They don't want to.

KONDRACKE: In the case of -- well, the -- hour friends in the Arab world aren't willing to do it and we've got enemies in the Arab world, Syria and Iran who are in cahoots with them.

LIASSON: On a bigger plane, this raises a lot of questions about the project of bringing democracy to these countries because so far we've seen not only in the Palestinian territories and in Lebanon, but also in Egypt where the Muslim brotherhood won a lot of seats in parliament, you could say in Iraq, where Muqtada al-Sadr, who's also the U.S. Considers him a pretty bad actor, he now controls four ministries inside the country. I mean, this is a question. If you are going to have free elections the bad guys will often -- will be elected.

FRED BARNES, "WEEKLY STANDARD": Well, I don't think the U.S. would go around the world setting up dictatorships.

LIASSON: Well, we us to think (ph) that, yes.

BARNES: But people can elect who they want. And then the Lebanese election was a very good idea, unfortunately, Hezbollah became part of the government. And that government in Lebanon has been afraid to take on Hezbollah. But, look, these are not groups that are just independent groups. I mean, they're groups -- Syria could tell Hamas to stop. The military leader of Hamas is in Syria holds press conferences publicly. Iran could tell Hezbollah to stop. Iran could stop sending money there. So, ultimately the enemies of Israel are Syria and Iran and it's going to come down to that militarily at some point.

HUME: When we come back with our panel, the ousted -- outed, excuse me, former CIA operative Valerie Plame is suing White House officials including the vice president for destroying her career and violating her and her husband's civil rights, that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HUME: On a day when Valerie Plame -- former CIA employee Valerie Plame and her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, there they had their picture taken on Capitol Hill as they were headed toward or from a meeting with Senate democrats, they also filed a lawsuit, the two of them did, in federal court here in Washington charging the vice president, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and others with a conspiracy to wreck their careers in violation of their civil rights. It says, among other things:

"This lawsuit concerns the intentional and malicious exposure by senior officials of the federal government of one such human source at the CIA, Valerie Plame Wilson, whose job it was to gather intelligence to make the nation safer and who risked her life for her country. This complaint" it goes on to say, "arises out a of conspiracy among current and former high-level officials in the White House.to violate the constitutional and other legal rights of Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV."

Well, what about it?

KONDRACKE: Well, you know, there is one sort of nut paragraph here, "upon information and belief," it says "defendants Libby, Rove, Cheney and John Doe's one to 10 reached an agreement to discredit, punish, and seek revenge upon the plaintiffs: da-da-da-da-da, it's on upon information and belief. There is no proof in here that there was a conspiracy in the White House to do all this. And when you go down the reporters who were involved in this, Bob Novak says he didn't get this information in the first instance from any of these people in particular and that the one -- his primary source was inadvertent, he says.

Secondly, Judy Miller who talked to Scooter Libby and did get information that -- apparently, that Valerie Plame worked at the CIA, never published the story. And, thirdly, Matt Cooper published after Novak. So, what this conspiracy was all about and how this, you know, violated their rights is just not there, it's not here in the case. So, it would have to emerge in court if they get to trial.

LIASSON: Yeah, and they're going to be able to do discovery and that's the whole purpose of this suit and I guess what they're attempting to do is so far what Patrick Fitzgerald hasn't done, which is to prove there was an intentional outing of her and that's specifically what he has been spending a lot of time and effort doing. Look, this -- at least, for people who feel that the Bush administration did something nefarious and wrong and this is going to keep this issue alive and I'm sure that on the other side republicans and the administration are going to feel not unlike what Clinton partisans felt when all those civil suits were filed against him, this is, you know, politics by lawsuit.

BARNES: It is politics by lawsuit but a very punitive politics. It's funny to read this complaint because it reads like some, you know, left- wing screen on one of those crazy Websites, you know, words bike "conspiracy" and all this stuff. And they are punishing Mr. Wilson for this and that. I disagree with Mara, I don't think this is going to keep this thing alive. I think this thing will be tossed out of court very quickly. It's designed just to hurt Karl Rove and others to make them have -- pay more legal fees and so on. They haven't a leg to stand on. These people -- talking beforehand, it wasn't -- this didn't hurt Plame and Wilson, this created them into national figures and he gets a book published, a crummy book, published and they're pictured in "Vanity Fair" and so on. They became celebrities as a result and besides she was basically an unimportant clerk, not a clerk, but an analyst at the CIA, wasn't some major figure there, I don't think she was covered by the secrecy act or anything, that's not the name of it, but...

LIASSON: Wait a second, if she wasn't covered why did the CIA make a complaint to the Justice Department?

BARNES: Because they do that routinely on any time anybody -- any CIA person...

LIASSON: But they wouldn't make a complaint if the person wasn't covered.

BARNES: .is outed like that, they do.

KONDRACKE: She was apparently a classified employee.

Yeah, she was.

BARNES: I don't think so.

KONDRACKE: Look, in retrospect, the White House should have rebutted Wilson in the open, not...

LIASSON: Sure.

BARNES: They did that.

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