Wednesday, October 12, 2005

whig and 8 redacted pages

* josh marshall on the wsj/whig article:
"If Karl Rove goes down in this investigation it'll be a disaster for the president, both in terms of the damage occasioned by such a high-level White House indictment and, frankly, because he needs the guy like most of us need legs.
But this WHIG thing is a whole 'nother level of hurt.
This group was the organizational team, the core group behind all the shameless crap that went down in the lead up to the Iraq war -- the lies about the cooked up Niger story, everything. If Fitzgerald has lassoed this operation into a criminal conspiracy, the veil of protective secrecy in which the whole operation is still shrouded will be pulled back. Depositions and sworn statements in on-going investigations have a way of doing that. Ask Bill Clinton. Every key person in the White House will be touched by it. And all sorts of ugly tales could spill out."
as you know, ive been beating this horse forever, and people are finally waking up, just days before the announcement. hellooooooooooo

* along the same lines, reddhedd has written a touching post reminding everyone that traitorgate, defined as the outing of a cia agent 'for retribution', has real world implications - the probable death of many people associated with BrewsterJennings. Further to that, we have the perhaps even greater costs associated with the outing of BrewsterJennings - ie the inability of BJ to continue their efforts wrt counter-proliferation of wmd.

ive long suspected that the "'treason-for-childish-retribution' argument" is really very thin (see here for example) - even though Wilson himself believes this to be the case. in my more speculative moments, its seems to make much more sense that the purpose of outing plame was specifically to out brewsterjennings and wilson merely provided an ostensible excuse.

ive oft-repeated that we dont have a clue what fitzgerald is up to - and that we might be very, very surprised by his indictments. the kremlinology is a lot of fun - and it might prove to be entirely accurate - but it could also very possibly be that fitzgerald is looking into a much broader conspiracy than 'the outing of Plame'. hell, for all i know, the wingnuts might be correct (altho not for reasons they believe), perhaps Wilson and Plame are themselves in Fitzgerald's crosshairs. I'm not specifically suggesting they are - but ive never joined the "lionizing Wilson" party. i havent read his book - so i dont know his story fully - but one of the mysteries of this case is why Wilson bravely stepped up to the plate to discredit the pro-war gang 4 months *after* the invasion. as best as i can tell, his defense is that he assumed that when they were talking about saddam trying to get uranium from africa, he assumed they meant somewhere other than niger - because he'd already debunked the niger story and he assumed they were honest. that storyline is plausible, but only marginally.

anyway, im not here to point the finger at the Wilsons - but there is a case to be made the purpose of outing plame was not to punish wilson (and signal to other whistleblowers) - but to out BJ. Trying to speculate about why they would want to do that requires triple tinfoil hatting - the most obvious possibility is that BJ was getting too close to uncovering something that wasnt supposed to be uncovered. given that BJ was supposed to be uncovering WMD networks, then the most likely candidate is that BJ was uncomfortably close to uncovering a clandestine WMD network, and the whitehouse didnt want it uncovered. thats pretty odd, right? if thats the case, then we'd have to assume that they were involved in one way or other...

if this is the case, what are the possible reasons? the most obvious are: 1) the people in the whitehouse are just a bunch of thugs and criminals who are using their positions for personal gain, and are actually weapons traders out to enrich themselves or 2) they are smuggling wmd's for more 'noble' purposes

as odd as those scenarios may appear at first glance - lets look at the evidence for each case.
if we consider the first case - that they are simply arms dealers - we've seen many examples over time where people in government use their position for this exact purpose. we have no problems imagining that 'other' governments around the world are basically arms dealers - is there any reason to believe that the same model couldnt be extended to the USG? not really. we know that the people in power are murderous war criminals, and we know that most, if not all, of the institutional checks and balances have collapsed. we know that people like AQ.Khan haven't been punished for trading in nukular secrets. we know that sibel edmonds claims to have uncovered a vast drug/arms dealing network, and we know that she has been gagged. we know that people like cheney and perle and others are from the military-industrial complex. and we know that a war was started for reasons that still escapes even the best of us - and we know that war is good business. in fact, we dont even need to imagine - we know that people like franklin and rhodes and ghonibar and kashogi and leeden and the like are involved in shady deals.

lets look at the second option - that they outed brewsterjennings because BJ was getting too close to to uncovering their 'noble' weapons smuggling. is this possible? i dont know much about iran-contra - but even the most benign of interpretations would point to exactly this type of situation - so its not like we have to be too imaginative to believe that this is at least plausible. as luck would have it, we are still dealing with many of the same characters. we know they've done it before - so its certainly plausible that they are still playing the same game.

of course, its impossible to know what really went on, and we can only hope that fitzgerald comes up with some real answers - but when you consider the fact that some of the most powerful people in the world conspired to out a spy and her entire counter-proliferation operation, which of the following scenarios makes the least sense - they did treasonously conspired :
1) to protect their own personal financial interest in weapons smuggling
2) because they were using a wmd racket for covert, 'noble', strategic, global reasons
3) so that they could marginally discredit a well-credentialled critic via the apparently emasculating smear that he couldnt get a pro-bono job without his wife's help.

my guess is that number 3 is the least likely candidate.

the counter-argument to that is 'well, they thought they could get away with it, cos they were full of hubris, and they didnt realise that ashcroft would have to recuse himself' - but then we are still left with the fact that even if they knew could get away with it, even if they didnt break any laws - they still outed an entire wmd spy-ring for no apparent reason.

i dont get it.

lets hope fitzgerald has some fabulous secrets stashed away underneath the black ink in those 8 redacted pages.

the suspense is killing

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