Reply #36: Well, now, isn't this something?

[H2O Man]

Here I think I'll be breaking an important piece of the Plame puzzle in the morning, only to find two of my best friends on DU already discussing it! I think that the story is covered in about 50 newspapers across the country this morning. They can be found at news at google for Plame.

One of the best is from Newsday; the author is our friend Patricia H., who has the very good grasp of exactly what is going on. She writes about the NY Times' attorney suing to block Fitzgerald's efforts to obtain their phone records.

A key phrase in her article is that this is part of a "sweeping 'leak' probe ..."

This phrase gives us reason to pause, and perhaps reflect upon some of the history of the case. Remember that about a year ago, the case was being buried while Attorney General Ashcroft pretended to be investigating who may have leaked Plame's identity to Novak and six other reporters. Ashcroft would be forced to recuse himself when some information became known that put the investigation into a "different light." The mass media reported that it likely involved Ashcroft's knowing some of the suspects.

Bullshit. Every DUer knows that Ashcroft is friends with and has close ties to every high-ranking White House official -- so if that were the reason to recuse himself, he would have done so on day one. It was something bigger than him being friends with Rove.

In the spring of 2004, the Plame threads started on DU. I had been predicting the date that the indictments for those individuals who exposed Plame to Novak would be handed down. I also quoted from a TIME story a few lines that indicated that there was far more to the story than revenge against Wilson for challenging Bush's lies. One phrase in the article made clear that the effort was taken to derail an investigation being undertaken by Plame that related to the sale of WMD components.

About a week before the date I had predicted, a federal judge agreed to give Fitzgerald an extension of the Grand Jury proceedings. This was because the scope of the investigation had increased significantly. Note that this occured after Fitzgerald got the phone records from the White House, including Air Force #1's.

We know that this expansion includes looking at the role the two NY Times reporters played in warning an Islamic charity that may have contributed to terrorists, that they were going to be visited by the FBI.

Then we learned that Larry Franklin had been caught giving state secrets to an Israeli front in Washington, DC. This was a part of a coordinated effort to set the stage for a strike/invasion of Iran. It is also known that the investigators know the Israeli front was the source of the forged Niger yellow cake documents.

The reporters in question have thus far only testified to a few conversations they had with one White House official. Fitzgerald is looking to blow the lid off the top of the White House cover-up. The reporter's phone records along with other phone records will play a role. They will lay a further foundation that will be used to compell the testimony of the NYT reporters, and a couple of others.

Early on in the Plame threads, I noted that there are intelligence resources who "serve" on every major media in the country.I think we see now that it is not simply that they "report" what they are told to: they make phone calls and manipulate to an extent that the public generally does not realize.

We all wish Fitz had produced indictments in July. But he has linked the Plame exposure with exactly what we had uncovered on the Plame threads: the biggest scandal in US history, which has huge domestic and international implications. When I wrote that we are faced with a constitutional crisis, it was not an exaggeration.