First comes smears, then come schemes and then come indictments for perjuries.
The State Department at the behest of Marc Grossman, the Under Secretary for Political Affairs - and if this isn't a political affair nothing is - cooked up a memo to refute, if necessary, the veracity of Ambassador Wilson's Niger Yellowcake report. It was sitting on a shelf, waiting. The White House was running hard with the `Saddam has nukes and in about 45 minutes there will be a mushroom cloud over Manhattan' meme.
The CIA and State knew about Joe's Niger non-findings but so far Joe was being the professional. He was sent to report; he gave his report; he expected his report to go through channels. Maybe, he thought, as he listened to Rice, Cheney and Bush, that the report was still winding its way through the Byzantine maze of the intelligence bureaucracy.
More -
But, State, anticipating trouble, had the memo drawn up just in case that suggested that Mr. & Mrs. Wilson were less than trustworthy political hacks who could not be counted on to advance the policy, regardless of the facts. The policy was, as if you need reminding, to fix the facts (or lies) around the policy of War with Iraq. The State Dept. report was sitting on the shelf; just in case.
Well, after the report obviously did not wind its way through the funhouse of mirrors otherwise known as the Bush Administration, and the President used the infamous 16 words in his State of the Union Address; "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," well good old patriot Joe Wilson felt he had to do something, so the President wouldn't keep on sticking his foot in his mouth.
Joe Wilson was doing the President a favor when he wrote his Op-Ed piece for the New York Times. He wanted the President to know that the CIA and State Department knew that those sixteen words were, uh, not entirely factual.
But talk about looking a gift-horse in the mouth - the White House, presumably including George Bush, so presumably George Bush was in on the `fix' went, well, the word `berserk' comes to mind. Vice President Cheney's office decided to do a `work up' on old Joe Wilson. In politics it's called opposition research. You know, drinking problems, distinguishing marks, spouses' clandestine intelligence career; you know, the usual.
Well, as I say, there is this oppo-research report sitting over at State; done at the behest of Marc Grossman. Nothing sinister; you know; it's political cover. It's SOP.
(From the Washington Monthly) MORE PLAME LEAKS....The New York Times reports another tiny morsel in the Valerie Plame case today.
Apparently Patrick Fitzgerald is trying to figure out who in the White House had access to a State Department memo about Joseph Wilson's 2002 trip to Niger that included Plame's name:
The memorandum was sent to Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, just before or as he traveled with President Bush and other senior officials to Africa starting on July 7, 2003....
Mr. Powell was seen walking around Air Force One during the trip with the memorandum in hand, said a person involved in the case who also requested anonymity because of the prosecutor's admonitions about talking about the investigation.
....The memorandum was dated June 10, 2003, nearly four weeks before Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times in which he recounted his mission and accused the administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq.
....When Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article appeared on July 6, 2003, a Sunday, Richard L. Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, called Carl W. Ford Jr., the assistant secretary for intelligence and research, at home, a former State Department official said. Mr. Armitage asked Mr. Ford to send a copy of the memorandum to Mr. Powell, who was preparing to leave for Africa with Mr. Bush, the former official said. Mr. Ford sent it to the White House for transmission to Mr. Powell.
So from there it's a hop, skip and a jump to leaking, lying and covering up.
The point of all this is that the CIA and State KNEW about Wilson's TRUTH and prepared to debunk it. To me the Rove, Libby, Miller, Novak nexus is an interesting parlor game, but I think that Pat Fitzgerald sees this as something else. The Judges he is working with seem to agree. It's not about outing a CIA operative; it's about destroying a whistleblower.
Joe Wilson blew the whistle on the chronic pattern of the Bush Administration's WMD high crimes and misdemeanors.
In a sense, the actions of the Bush & Co. against Joe Wilson PROVES the Downing Street Memo revelations. Rove, in his email to Hadley bragged that he debunked Wilson's assertions. He wasn't debunking "Cheney sent Wilson to Niger," he was debunking Wilson.
The "TRUTH" was that Saddam had WMDs and anything veering from that truth had to be assassinated - information, character and motive included.
It's all out there and we know the truth.
Let me tell you something; 30 plus years after Watergate my in-laws still believe that Nixon was railroaded out of office by partisan politics. And 30 years from now, some of my nieces and nephews from that side of the family will believe the same thing about whoever takes the fall for the high crimes of the Bush Administration.
We know the truth; they lied to advance an illegal, immoral and irresponsible war in Iraq. It's a war that cannot be won and has no end in sight. And at the most, maybe, if we're lucky, someone like Rove or Libby will spend about the same amount of time in prison as Judith Miller. A slap on the wrist for treason of the worst sort.
But, if you believe in Justice; Universal Justice, Karma, if you will, like I do, then your faith rests in the knowledge that even if they get away with it now, ultimately there will be hell to pay.
As it says on the almighty dollar; In God We Trust.
And hopefully Pat Fitzgerald.