"Prosecutors conduct series of meetings described as 'tense, combative'... Armed with handwritten White House notes, detailed cell phone logs, e-mails between presidential aides and reporters, prosecutors demand explanations of conversations... Developing..."
Presidential aides? Libby is officially an Assistant to the President, but the use of the plural is … intriguing. Just how many neocons nested in the very heart of our government are going to be frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs? I sure hope they show it on television! Justin Raimondo article
That phrase, which is taken from Joseph Wilson's original statements about the outing of his wife* - "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs" - just captures my fancy and tickles me for some reason.
The trial – and you can bet there's going to be one – promises to be the best show since the Watergate hearings. Time to dust off the old television, get out the popcorn-maker, and stock up on Cheezits. It's party time!
What we'll be celebrating, as special counsel Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald prosecutes this case, is the Waterloo of the War Party. And it is shaping up to be a real turkey shoot.
Justin, I sure hope you're right. I had no interest in O.J., but a trial here would get even me to turn on the TV. My feeling when Fitzgerald was appointed to the investigation was not hopeful, simply because they seemed to make such a fuss about how great he is. Too jaded, perhaps, or too many times burned, I was expecting Fitzgerald to find "nothing" and, because he was so built up, we would have to be satisfied that the reason was because there was nothing to find.
The propaganda campaign that led to war was conducted out of a little-known department of the Pentagon bureaucracy, indeed one that did not exist until the countdown to war. The Office of Special Plans, under Defense Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, bypassed the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, and side-stepped their Air Force counterpart, piping a steady diet of lies into the President's otherwise empty head...
We're going to get quite an education, as the trial of the neocons unfolds, and at the end of it if we don't all have advanced degrees in Neoconology, we'll at least be well versed in the views – and loyalties – of this mystery cult, which, for the first time in recent years, will be given a highly visible public face by the defendants.
And that would be the great value of it. Sort of like those first big public Mafioso trials. And, in a real sense, this is much like that - the old tradition of quiet covert manipulation of government has been thrown aside by a bunch of arrogant power-mad men in favor of flaunting their power. Out of control. And that's when you trip yourself up.
It's all entertainment value in the end, though, because the power base always regroups and goes on about its business, perhaps under a new guise or another outlet. It will always be there. In this world.
An interesting concurrent story, as reported by Josh Marshall (earlier post), is that, without fanfare, the "yellowcake" forgeries investigation is about to blow open as well. And that should really be interesting.
As Joshua Micah Marshall points out, it was Dick Cheney who first raised the Niger uranium story in the Spring of 2002, and a few months later – presto! – a batch of forged documents showed up, just like magic, in Italy....The documents were forwarded to Washington, where the CIA and other intelligence analysts flatly pronounced them fakes. But, as Marshall puts it, "that didn't stop their life in the U.S. national security bureaucracy." Why not? Because the War Party needed ammunition in their fight to take us into Iraq, and didn't mind shooting a few blanks so long as they made a loud noise.
...A rogue group of U.S. government officials, in league with whomever broke into the Niger embassy in Rome, somehow injected these bogus documents into the intelligence stream, which then flowed directly into the President's State of the Union. Whoever did it is guilty of much more than violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Try espionage on for size.
*"At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words." ----Joseph Wilson, August 21, 2003
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated. There may be some delay before your comment is published. It all depends on how much time M has in the day. But please comment!