1 Boring Old Man

Various blogs have made attempts to explain the legal aspects of the Plame suit. I have read them over and here’s what I learned: Why I went to Medical School instead of Law School. I gather that the first step is getting the case into a court, and there are issues that must be resolved to get it into court, things like national security concerns and immunity. I don’t follow how someone can claim that a case about a leak that jepordized national security can be avoided because of national security, but I’ll be the first to admit that legal argument mystifies me. I’m still in the Solomon cutting the baby in half camp on legal issues.

It seems patently obvious to me that from what we already know that this Administration "injured" the Wilsons, and did it in a sneaky, underhanded way. The "why" of it isn’t contested. It was because they didn’t like what Ambassador Wilson said in his oped. If what he said wasn’t the truth, why did they retract the 16 words within days of his article? We now know the Niger documents were a blatant forgery, and that the C.I.A. had already said they were a blatant forgery, and that the reason for Wilson’s trip in the first place was a request from the Vice President. And the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity? All the instances were from Administration officials, and there’s not a question why they did it, that I can see.

My point is, through all of this, our worst fears of what the Administration did in the lead-up to the Iraq War have all turned out to be true. Even those of us who didn’t believe their claims at the time couldn’t have imagined the actual level of duplicity that is now already in the public record. In fact, Joseph Wilson’s contention in his atricle, What I Didn’t Find in Africa, now seems a gross understatement:

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

What we would now say is, "some?!" It’s more like "all?!"

So my questions aren’t about the Administration’s slander of the Wilsons. That is a fact, one that will probably be used as an example of an Ad Hominem attack in Logic Textbooks forever. It might even become a new word in the dictionary:

wilson:

1. [verb] a ploy used by guilty people to discredit their accuser by attacking their accuser’s spouse.
2. [noun] a personified soccer ball.

My question is when do we get to the part where the Administration is put on trial for conspiring to "manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?"