It is a strange, strange thing to hear the wagon-circling Republican spin on the likely forthcoming White House indictments:
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, speaking on the NBC news program “Meet the Press,” compared the leak investigation with the case of Martha Stewart and her stock sale, “where they couldn’t find a crime and they indict on something that she said about something that wasn’t a crime.” Ms. Hutchison said she hoped “that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn’t indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.” |
God forbid a special prosecutor should deliver charges based not on the original crime under investigation but instead on “some perjury technicality”! How soon they forget. A mere seven years ago, such technicalities led the Republican Party to impeach a popular chief executive presiding over an era of peace and prosperity. As it happened, the Starr inquest dug its way through the ancient history of the Clinton family finances for many more years than the Fitzgerald investigation — and, unable to find anything there, ended up prosecuting the president for lies he delivered about a tawdry sex scandal that had zero relevance to any national issue.
The Fitzgerald investigation, on the other hand, may hang on an arcane issue of revealing the identity of a CIA covert operative — but it is rooted in a controversy that is still costing American lives and harming the national interest. The Bush administration led the U.S. into war under false pretenses. It ignored the intelligence it didn’t want to believe and it ballyhooed information that it should have known was lies. Then it waged a brutal “politics of personal destruction” against anyone who questioned its misbegotten policies and the arrogant and incompetent policy-making process that spawned them.
At almost any other time in American history, such events would have naturally and inevitably inspired an independent investigation to find and air the truth. But the Bush administration learned its lesson from the 9/11 commission, and Republican dominance over “all three branches of government” today means that its cover-ups, generally, have been successful.
But it appears that the roundabout path of the Plame inquiry’s special prosecutor will finally begin to bring to light at least some of the heart of the matter. If there is heat, and with any luck some light, around these indictments, it will not be related to issues of anonymous sourcing in the press or the status of a covert agent: it will be about the American public finally getting a clear picture of just how far off the track of truth and sanity Bush and Cheney drove the country in their single-minded determination to invade Iraq.
That’s why the two columns on today’s New York Times op-ed page that attempt to downplay the importance of this issue are so off-base (and why my Salon colleague Joan Walsh is so on target in her analysis today). Nick Kristof argues, “It was wrong for prosecutors to cook up borderline and technical indictments during the Clinton administration, and it would be just as wrong today. Absent very clear evidence of law-breaking, the White House ideologues should be ousted by voters, not by prosecutors.” It remains to be seen what sort of “very clear evidence” Fitzgerald has or doesn’t have. If he has evidence that top White House officials, all the way up to the vice president, lied in an attempt to cover up a campaign of character assassination against a critic who presented evidence of a larger cover-up of a campaign of deception that led the nation into war, I’d say that goes well beyond a “borderline and technical indictment.”
John Tierney offers an even broader preemptive dismissal of the Fitzgerald indictments. His flip headline — “And your point is?” — suggests that the whole scandal is trivial. The CIA didn’t really know what was going on in Iraq; its analyses were all over the map, so we should give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt. So what if they committed the nation to a bloody war of choice based on a mistake? They were just as confused as everyone else! “No one deserves to be indicted on conspiracy charges for belonging to a group that believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Foreign policy mistakes are not against the law.”
No, they are not — but lying about them to a grand jury is. And while some mistakes are made because of bad information, the Iraq mistake was based more on willful arrogance, along with a tendency to shoot messengers like Joe Wilson who bore good information.
This is not about interns and stained dresses; it is about a tragic war that is still being tragically fought. And from where I sit, the 2000 dead American soldiers, and an untallied greater number of dead Iraqis, are owed some truth on a level that the president and vice-president are constitutionally incapable of delivering, or perhaps even comprehending.
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