[Mb-civic] Maureen Dowd

[Mike Blaxill]

 Who's on First?
    By Maureen Dowd
    The New York Times

    Saturday 29 October 2005

    It was bracing to see the son of a New York
doorman open the door on the mendacious
Washington lair of the Lord of the Underground.

    But this Irish priest of the law, Patrick
Fitzgerald, neither Democrat nor Republican, was
very strict, very precise. He wasn't totally
gratifying in clearing up the murkiness of the
case, yet strangely comforting in his quaint
black-and-white notions of truth and honor
(except when his wacky baseball metaphor seemed
to veer toward a "Who's on first?" tangle).

    "This indictment's not about the propriety of
the war," he told reporters yesterday in his big
Eliot Ness moment at the Justice Department. The
indictment was simply about whether the son of an
investment banker perjured himself before a grand
jury and the F.B.I.

    Scooter does seem like a big fat liar in the
indictment. And not a clever one, since his
deception hinged on, of all people, the popular
monsignor of the trusted Sunday Church of
Russert. Does Scooter hope to persuade a jury to
believe him instead of Little Russ?

    Good luck.

    There is something grotesque about Scooter's
hiding behind the press with his little
conspiracy, given that he's part of an
administration that despises the press and tried
to make its work almost impossible.

    Mr. Fitzgerald claims that Mr. Libby hurt
national security by revealing the classified
name of a CIA officer. "Valerie Wilson's friends,
neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had
another life," he said.

    He was not buying the arguments on the right
that Mrs. Wilson was not really undercover or was
under "light" cover, or that blowing her cover
did not hurt the CIA

    "I can say that for the people who work at
the CIA and work at other places, they have to
expect that when they do their jobs that
classified information will be protected," he
said, adding: "They run a risk when they work for
the CIA that something bad could happen to them,
but they have to make sure that they don't run
the risk that something bad is going to happen to
them from something done by their own fellow
government employees."

    To protect a war spun from fantasy, the Bush
team played dirty. Unfortunately for them, this
time they Swift-boated an American whose job gave
her legal protection from the business-as-usual
smear campaign.

    The back story of this indictment is about
the ongoing Tong wars of the CIA, the White
House, the State Department and the Pentagon: the
fight over who lied us into war. The CIA, after
all, is the agency that asked for a special
prosecutor to be appointed to investigate how one
of its own was outed by the White House.

    The question Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly
declined to answer yesterday - Dick Cheney's
poker face has finally met its match - was
whether this stops at Scooter.

    No one expects him to "flip," unless he
finally gets the sort of fancy white-collar
criminal lawyer that The Washington Post said he
is searching for - like the ones who succeeded in
getting Karl Rove off the hook, at least for now
- and the lawyer tells Scooter to nail his boss
to save himself.

    But what we really want to know, now that we
have the bare bones of who said what to whom in
the indictment, is what they were all thinking
there in that bunker and how that hothouse bred
the idea that the way out of their Iraq problems
was to slime their critics instead of addressing
the criticism. What we really want to know, if
Scooter testifies in the trial, and especially if
he doesn't, is what Vice did to create the
spidery atmosphere that led Scooter, who seemed
like an interesting and decent guy, to let his
zeal get the better of him.

    Mr. Cheney, eager to be rid of the meddlesome
Joe Wilson, got Valerie Wilson's name from the
CIA and passed it on to Scooter. He forced the
CIA to compromise one of its own, a sacrifice on
the altar of faith-based intelligence.

    Vice spent so much time lurking over at the
CIA, trying to intimidate the analysts at Langley
into twisting the intelligence about weapons,
that he should have had one of his undisclosed
locations there.

    This administration's grand schemes always
end up as the opposite. Officials say they're
promoting national security when they're hurting
it; they say they're squelching terrorists when
they're breeding them; they say they're bringing
stability to Iraq when the country's imploding.
(The U.S. announced five more military deaths
yesterday.)

    And the most dangerous opposite of all: W.
was listening to a surrogate father he shouldn't
have been listening to, and not listening to his
real father, who deserved to be listened to.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102905Y.shtml