libby wilson and plame. again.

in response to my recent post about libby and his monomaniacal focus on wilson, noise in the comments has some questions:

"Why did Libby lie to the FBI and Fitzgerald in the first place? It seems he may have gotten off if he had stuck to the story that he didn't think Plame's status was classified."

my working hypothesis is to go with the suggestion that a) he was trying to kick the can down the road past the election b) he was firewalling cheney - although it could be more nefarious than that.

Still don't get the thing with Wilson. They could have claimed Wilson didn't spend enough time investigating. They could have claimed the Niger story didn't really matter. The could have done a number of things to discount Wilson.

this is the million dollar question. to the extent that the 'official story' has any validity, they simply could have ignored him - like they've ignored a hundred other scandals. the most obvious strategy they should/could have taken is to say 'he was only there for eight days, drinking tea with his diplomat friends - and the brits still stand by their intelligence' - that would have been the end of it. i think leopold's latest shows that they were shit-scared of something else he might say. as i mentioned in that previous post - it seems wilson was keeping some powder dry.

The whole damn thing is making less sense as we find out more details.
For example, Bush kicking the weapon inspectors out should have been 100 times more of a story than Wilson and the uranium claims story.

no no no - you havent been listening to your right-winger friends! it was saddam who wouldn't let the inspectors into iraq. HE WAS HIDING SOMETHING!!!

I still think they purposely made the Wilson story a big deal to distract from something else. Meaning, what Wilson found out about the Niger claims wasn't important to them (Libby and Cheney) at all.
Was it BJ? Was it nuclear proliferation as it concerned Iran? Or was it something else altogether?

ummm. i think it is right that the niger/iraq story is a redherring. but i think their panic re Wilson was heartfelt - i'm just not sure what he has that can hurt them. before jason leopold's piece yesterday, i had assumed that it was BJ related - but to the extent that leopold's piece is valid, it almost seems like outing plame was just a shot across the bow. i suspect that outing BJ was useful to them, but it now seems that there is even more to the story.

yesterday i raised the 'odd' possibility that cheney and libby were helping iran develop its nuclear program via AQKhan and that Wilson and/or plame may have become aware of that. that possibility doesnt seem any more odd than it did yesterday...