I don't always agree with Juan Cole, but I think his perceptions on the Karl Rove issue hit the nail on the head. Cole not only addresses the Plame/Wilson incident, but also points out how similar tactics were employed against retired General Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secratary Paul O'Neil. (Cole points out that O'Neil blew the whistle on the Iraq war planning in January of 2001, and leaves it to us to figure out the significance of the date.)
I think everyone needs to keep in mind that Karl Rove is just one piece of a giant, sinister (yes, I said "sinister") puzzle. It's fairly clear that the plan to invade Iraq was concieved by the neoconservative Project for the New American Century no later than January of 1998. If we keep digging, we're going to find a lot of skeletons.
Cap,
ReplyDeleteI'm preparing a piece for tomorrow morning in which I'll speculate on just what Fitzgerald's up to, and just how big the scandal is.
Just my speculation, but if it looks, smells, sounds, tastes, and feels like a big go-down...
Ah, I have that all backwards. This from O'Donnell:
ReplyDeleteIn February, Circuit Judge David Tatel joined his colleagues’ order to Cooper and Miller despite his own, very lonely finding that indeed there is a federal privilege for reporters that can shield them from being compelled to testify to grand juries and give up sources. He based his finding on Rule 501 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which authorizes federal courts to develop new privileges “in the light of reason and experience.” Tatel actually found that reason and experience “support recognition of a privilege for reporters’ confidential sources.” But Tatel still ordered Cooper and Miller to testify because he found that the privilege had to give way to “the gravity of the suspected crime.”
Judge Tatel’s opinion has eight blank pages in the middle of it where he discusses the secret information the prosecutor has supplied only to the judges to convince them that the testimony he is demanding is worth sending reporters to jail to get. The gravity of the suspected crime is presumably very well developed in those redacted pages. Later, Tatel refers to “[h]aving carefully scrutinized [the prosecutor’s] voluminous classified filings.”
Some of us have theorized that the prosecutor may have given up the leak case in favor of a perjury case, but Tatel still refers to it simply as a case “which involves the alleged exposure of a covert agent.” Tatel wrote a 41-page opinion in which he seemed eager to make new law -- a federal reporters’ shield law -- but in the end, he couldn’t bring himself to do it in this particular case. In his final paragraph, he says he “might have” let Cooper and Miller off the hook “[w]ere the leak at issue in this case less harmful to national security.”
Tatel’s colleagues are at least as impressed with the prosecutor’s secret filings as he is. One simply said “Special Counsel’s showing decides the case.”
All the judges who have seen the prosecutor’s secret evidence firmly believe he is pursuing a very serious crime, and they have done everything they can to help him get an indictment.