Unless Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald decides that his two-year investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame for political reasons has turned up nothing, or plans to request an extension of the life of the federal grand jury to permit even more investigating, tomorrow is indictment day in D.C.
Leading candidates are Ken Rove and Lawrence "Scooter" Libby, not that they would do such a thing...burn the spy-wife of a diplomat to teach him not to show-up their boss, the president, by making him a liar when it came to the reason we needed to go to war against Iraq, before the invasion.
A lot depends on whether Ms. Plame (Wilson) was deeply-enough undercover to be covered by the statute making it a crime to reveal the identity of one of our undercover intelligence officers as a spy.
Yesterday it was reported that Fitzgerald's FBI guys had just interviewed her neighbors (again) to make sure that none of them were aware that she was a spy instead of an economic consultant, which was what her cover (non-official cover, or NOC) portrayed her as. I'm glad I read all those James Bond books as a yoot' so I could follow all this.
It seems to me that the real crime here is that the president's men felt it all right to go after a critic's wife after the critic successfully called the president a liar. The operative political principle seems to be "You haff relatives in ze old country?" We well get you, in other words, even if we have to go after your relatives that you so carelessly left behind. That was Germany under Hitler, not the U.S., at least not in the version I absorbed as a kid where we were the GOOD guys who didn't torture prisoners. Times have changed obviously, or we have.
Today we torture prisoners so we can get all that really good intelligence, as in "Tell me what you want to know and I'll tell you it's so, just as long as you please stop torturing me or my family and friends." If it was good enough for Torquemada in the war for Christian souls and against anti-Catholic heresy, it is good enough for us in the war against radical Islamic terrorists, and against truth in the Bush White House.
On other fronts, Harriet Miers, tired of "twisting slowly, slowly in the wind," a Haldeman phrase from the Nixon White House that referred to FBI director L. Patrick Gray, pulled her nomination to the Supreme Court this morning, thankfully.
With the decks clear we can focus on the indictments.
My guess is that counsel for Rove and Libby have been busy copping deals for resignation and probation timed to end the volcanic scandal at the moment of explosion, tomorrow. The president then says, "Thank goodness we're past that and I'm sorry a couple of supporters were a bit overzealous. They've left government service and have opened a think tank. I may be calling them unofficially from time to time." It's either that or he has to pardon them now or on his last day in office. Probably signs the pardons and puts them in his top drawer in case he gets hit by the proverbial bus. It's okay with me as long as we learn that if you want to come after me for opening my big mouth, that's okay, but leave my family alone, okay? After all, this is America and there are some things we should just know without being told. And cut out the torture, while you're at it, wontcha?.