1 Boring Old Man

How easy it is to forget the timeline of what is called Plamegate, but what is really about a White House Conspiracy to cover up some dark dealings. Who knows if the President and Vice President every really believed that the Intelligence actually supported their claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? They came into office with an agenda to unseat Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein. That’s unquestioned. Their War on Terror plans were heavily colored by the Iraqi agenda. That’s a matter of record. Their focus on Iraq after the September 11th, 2001 attack caught a lot of us by surprise, as did the escalating rhetoric. We know that the plan to attack Iraq was in the works by June 2002 from the Downing Street Memos. We know that they were searching for a justification in the Intelligence community. We also know from the Downing Street Memo that it was their intention to ignore the U.N. and go to war independent of the opinion of the international community. The report of a possible attempt by Hussein to buy Uranium from Niger was irresistable, though, from the start, it was a hoax.

Now we know something new. Vice President Cheney and I. Lewis Scooter Libby were told in June, 2003 by the C.I.A. that the Niger Documents were definitely false. The significance of this new fact is that the "outing" of Valerie Plame to discredit her husband was undertaken with full knowledge that what Joe Wilson alleged in his New York Times article was absolutely correct. So, when they were saying that he should be discounted, that the trip was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, it was clearly for a reason. The reason [motive] was to keep Wlson’s revelation that the Intelligence was false from making too many waves. Cheney’s loud claims about Iraq were false, and he kept making them even after being told by the C.I.A. that they were false.

My guess is that all of our speculation about who knew what is silly. I’d bet they all knew, and had a nice good-old-boy laugh about it all, until it blew up in their faces. It is simply not credible that anyone acted alone. It sounds like a Karl Rove idea to me, and indeed, it has been reported that he came up with it in a W.H.I.G. meeting. That makes all in attendance part of it – that’s a conspiracy. It’s what the term means.

It happened. It’s not a fantasy. It’s not something made up by liberals to discredit the Administration. They went one dirty trick too far. The evidence that we already have in the public domain is damning enough. We suspect Patrick Fitzgerald has more. Were I he, I’d want to be sure too. The magnitude of the charge is overwhelming. The President of the United States and his Administration took us into an unprovoked war with a Middle Eastern Country based on false pretenses. When someone threatened to make the deceit public knowledge, they sacrificed an Intelligence Agent’s career in an orchestrated attempt to cover their tracks. In the ensuing investigation, every single one of them lied, in one way or another – every single one of them…

For Fitz and his team, having immersed themselves in this world for the last months and having seen how these people operate, the fiduciary obligation to the citizens of this nation taking a seat far behind the needs of political expediency for this President and his corrupt band of Machiavellian cronies, their ends justifies the means no matter what the damn cost methodology — if you think for one moment that a man like Pat Fitzgerald and his staff aren’t completely disgusted…well, you are just hopeless.

Read all of the above, and tell me you can’t feel the downpour, the thunder of a storm gathering in the distance — and tell me you aren’t also looking forward to the deluge that will follow, the steady stream of cleansing rain. Here’s hoping.

from Reddhedd, Firedoglake