Thursday, October 20, 2005

The Importance of the Plame Investigation

James Moore has a devastating piece in Huffington on the significance of the investigations being conducted by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. I think you owe it to yourself to read the whole post. But here's the key graph:

Patrick Fitzgerald has before him the most important criminal case in American history. Watergate, by comparison, was a random burglary in an age of innocence. The investigator’s prosecutorial authority in this present case is not constrained by any regulation. If he finds a thread connecting the leak to something greater, Fitzgerald has the legal power to follow it to the web in search of the spider. It seems unlikely, then, that he would simply go after the leakers and the people who sought to cover up the leak when it was merely a secondary consequence of the much greater crime of forging evidence to foment war. Fitzgerald did not earn his reputation as an Irish alligator by going after the little guy. Presumably, he is trying to find evidence that Karl Rove launched a covert operation to create the forged documents and then conspired to out Valerie Plame when he learned the fraud was being uncovered by Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. As much as this sounds like the plot of a John le Carre novel, it also comports with the profile of the Karl Rove I have known, watched, traveled with and written about for the past 25 years.

This case is crucial to America's survival as a united Republic. If the Bush Administration gets away with lying this country into the Iraq disaster, then it can truly be said that our political system of checks and balances is dying.
And there may be no way to save it.

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