the failure to plant WMD

* Jurassicpork is a regular over at drifty's place - he has a new contest: how do you know when a republican is dead?

* billmon has graced us with his presence, ever so briefly. i've been worrying about him (and missing him)

* AP :

"Lawyers for (libby) are suggesting they may delve deeply at his criminal trial into infighting among the White House, the CIA and the State Department over pre-Iraq war intelligence failures.

New legal documents raise the potential that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's trial could turn into a political embarrassment for the Bush administration by focusing on whether the White House manipulated intelligence to justify the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

In a court filing late Friday night, Libby's legal team said that in June and July 2003, the status of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame was at most a peripheral issue to "the finger-pointing that went on within the executive branch about who was to blame" for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction."

cornstock must be rolling in her gravy. this is the divide&conquer wedge that has always been key - separating the weak from the daft. I suspect that Liby is coorect to say that Plame was peripheral compared to the other stuff - but we know that she wasn't peripheral per se. and we know that the "blame for the failure to find WMD" is also a ruse - the "failure to find" is subservient to the "blame for the failure to plant WMD" (which is life's much larger mystery).

I haven't seen the court documents yet - but both jeralyn and leopold date the Plame stuff back to March - not june/july - so it'll be interesting to see what shots Libby is shooting across the bow.