The web’s aflame with rumor and speculation over Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Plame kerfuffle. Of course, I get all my Plame news from Tom Maguire, who never grows tired of the fact that we know so little. Consider that Fitzgerald and his people are famously closed lipped. Who do all these leaks come from? Even if they came from Fitzgerald (gigantic if there), let me remind you of the most important point about leaks involving politics (OK, any leak for that matter) – they are always self serving for the leaker. Always. The fact that the leaker can provide only partial truth allows the leaker to control and manipulate the story.

And isn’t leaking grand jury testimony a crime as well? I understand a witness can come out and talk about the questioning, even lie about it like good old Sid Blumenthal, but other than that the testimony is legally protected. So the only way for it not to be a crime is if the leaker about a particular witnesses testimony ultimately derived their leak from the particular witness? Which leads us right back to the self serving nature of any leak. Sigh.

So what’s really going on here. Is the most important part of the whole sodden mess the fact that Valerie Plame was outed as a CIA employee? Is it that CIA is a rogue organization that is trying to undermine the elected President of the United States? Or does it’s import derive as proxy for the Iraq war itself?

Personally, what I care about most is the unauthorized discloure of classified information. If Fitzgerald can return indictments about that, even perjury indictements, I’ll consider it a successful investigation. But I want the perjury to be perjury, not just how good Karl Rove’s memory is. So if he deliberately lied to conceal unauthorized disclosure, then good. If he forgot a particular conversation of several that occured with one or more people, then bad. And by that I mean if he were tardy in disclosing a conversation with Matt Cooper, someone who Rove had no reason to believe wouldn’t disclose, then an indictment is just butt covering.

But if it turns out that the Valerie Plame wasn’t covert and the CIA persued this case while it has let plenty of other equally or more serious dislosures go in the past, then I think the CIA becomes the big story. Why should it be OK for a disgruntled current or ex-CIA employee to disclose classified information to the press, but not the White House?

Here are the unanswered questions for me. Was Valerie Plame a covert agent at the time her name was leaked? If so, it raised for me another important question then – how did her name leave the CIA? What does that say about their security proceedures? If not, what is the CIA trying to pull here?

Which reporter broke the sacred confidentiality to tell Joe Wilson who the sources were? I mean, how else was he able to finger Karl Rove and Scooter Libby way back at the start of the kerfuffle? It was only a month after Novak’s article that Wilson said he wanted to see Karl Rove “frogmarched” out of the White House in handcuffs. Libby’s name followed soon after, and then Joe Wilson backtracked and shut up about it. Odd how the press isn’t interested in Joe Wilson’s source, which he admitted to, and how that source named the two people that have been most prominently featured as people who talked to the press.

Speaking of Joe, why isn’t he being investigated as the man who clearly did the most to out his own wife? For those who like convoluted conspiracies (I’m not one), why not think the Valerie was tired of living the covert life, have Joe out you, and bam you’re out, in the clear, the darlings of the media, book deals, Vanity Fair articles. Hey, it’s more plausible than Flight Plan.

What about the role of the State Department? Plame was “moving to State Department cover”, there are reports of a State Department memo with her name in it, State opposed the war in Iraq just like the CIA. Has the institutional opposition at these two power centers overstepped the bounds of good government? And will we ever see that probed?

Most of all, what does Fitzgerald really have?

OK, that last one is a repeat of how we know so little. And what amazes me is how there are some who don’t seem to realize that. We don’t even know if Valerie Plame was covert. Did the neighbors know she worked for the CIA? I have no idea, but Mark Kleiman is convinced by an article in the LAT which relies on two neighbors. Did the LAT contact “all” the neighbors but only inlcuded quotes from two? Cliff May said lots of people in Washington knew a long time ago – but Cliff wasn’t a neighbor. Was he just talking trash, or was he telling the truth? Beats me, I don’t live in Washington. We have to rely on these leaked reports to the press, which clearly has lower standards about such leaks than, say, allegations by a victim that she was raped by Bill Clinton.

Some people don’t even know what we do know – namely that Joe Wilson is a liar who came forward not courageously before the war, but after when the status of the Iraq WMD was known. If Ambassador Wilson was so upset by President Bush’s so called manipulation of intellegence before the war (you know, when CIA head Tenet was claiming that Iraqi WMD was a “slam dunk”), why didn’t he come forward then, when it could have done some good?

One last final thoughts (not for the subject, just the post) – whatever you may think of Fitzgerald’s integrity, it seems as if people are treating the indictments as the final word on the subject. They aren’t, they are just accusations. I know that depending on whose ox is being gored, people will ignore that fact or ignore every other fact.

Tags: Dick Cheney, Joe Wilson, Karl Rove, plamegate, Scooter Libby, Valerie Plame, Wilsongate