The Trial Heats Up

Today is a good day for watchers of the CIA leak case and the trial of Scooter Libby.  Today is the day that Ari Fleischer, former Bush administration Press Secretary (before the lying blob Scott McClellan and the practiced liar Tony Snow), will testify on behalf of the prosecution.  Fleischer has admitted leaking the identity of Valerie Plame to reporters and also sought an immunity deal with Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald almost as soon as the investigation began.  It appears that Fleischer was pretty sure he was in legal trouble from the very beginning and his discomfort over the leak may (I stress may) have been part of the reason for his sudden departure from the White House not long after.  If Fleischer thought he might be in trouble for leaking classified information about a covert CIA operative, it stands to reason that Cheney, Rove, Scooter and the rest of the leakers were also aware of the potential illegality of what they had done.  I’m waiting on pins and needles to find out what Ari has to say.

Last week, Raw Story put up a comprehensive timeline and investigative piece about the Bush administration’s building of a case for an attack on Iran.  It’s a great piece of journalism, but after reading it, I couldn’t help but feel that the Valerie Plame angle was missing.  There is a connection between the outing of Valerie Plame and the building of a case for war with Iran, I just feel it in my bones.  I suspect that the outing of Plame had more to do with a desire to derail her work, remember she was working on Iran, than about punishing her husband, Joe Wilson for his op-ed basically calling Bush a liar.  Is it possible that she was a cog in the war machine that had its sights set on attacking Iran?

I’ve long been hoping that Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation would make public some of the connections between the forged document from Niger that Cheney used to justify the “Iraq is a nuclear threat” lie he inserted in the State of the Union speech, the shady cast of characters with a hard on for regime change in Iran (the same criminals, neo-cons and international arms (and lie) peddlers that brought us Iran-Contra), and the plans for preemptively attacking Iran.  It may be too much to hope for, but Patrick Fitzgerald is one of the few people with all of the information needed to connect the dots and prove that this rogue administration is guilty of lying to Congress and the American people for the most serious of reasons, to sell war.  We The People need to know what Fitzgerald knows, although at this point, the odds aren’t in our favor.