As everyone falls all over themselves speculating as to who will be indicted, we all seem to overlook three simple inquiries that every criminal investigator always ask when they look at a conspiracy:
Who had the means?
Who had the motive?
And who stood to benefit?
Add those all together and it spells AIPAC. And the Mossad. And Patrick Fitzgerald may be on to the biggest espionage operation in American history.
More below the fold...
QUESTION: Who had the means to expose Valerie Plame's clandestine identity?
Who among us could say, to a certainty, that someone we know is a CIA operative, particularly an undercover case officer in the Diretorate of Operations?
I know that I could not. And I've known some CIA types over the years who ;fessed up once they were retired.
But who would be a position to know?
ANSWER: Another foreign intelligence agency.
QUESTION: Who had the motive to expose Valerie Plame's identity?
In case anyone has forgotten, Saddam Hussein was paying the families of suicide bombers $25,000 a pop -- no pun intended -- to blow themselves up in Israeli cities. Israelis were dying by the hundreds nearly every week at the hands of Saddam-subsidized jihadists.
The Israelis wanted Saddam dead or gone or both. Badly. But they could not run the risk of taking on his army or ticking off the rest of the Arab world by attacking him. Which may be why they called their friends in AIPAC and the neocon cult to draft their minions to do the dirty work.
QUESTION: Who benefitted from outing Valerie Plame?
Americans don't go into a war willy-nilly, at least not before Iraq. We need a reason; or, at the very least, some pretext. Vietnam, after all, was preceded by either a very nervous botswain's mate in the Tonkin Gulf seeing something on a radar screen that wasn't there, or by sinister war mongers in the Johnson Administration, depending on which side you believe.
Some person or some group manufactured the evidence of the yellowcake in Niger. Some person or group created the false information that got stovepiped to the Vice President's office in it's most raw, unanalyzed form.
Does it really seem coincidental that Scooter Libby =
an old neocon hand --- outed Valerie Plame to the NYT's Judith Miller? Does it not seem just a bit odd that when the error of Plame's exposure -- that it was a felony -- Bob May, the press flack for the Israel lobby's Center for the Defense of the Democracies was -- the SAME DAY --- protesting that it wasn't a big deal? That Plame's identity was 'an open secret'? Does it surprise ANYBODY that AIPAC and their minions in the Pentagon -- Perle, Libby, and the rest of the neocons --- desperately wanted to create a pretext for an American war that would exterminate Saddam Hussein?
Come on, Mr. Fitzgerald...show us what you're really made of....go after the real skeleton in the closet...go after the spy ring that has permeated the Pentagon for at least five years...and even further back.