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Who's on First?
By MAUREEN DOWD
10/29/05 "New
York Times" -- -- WASHINGTON -- 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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A.
"I can say that for the people who work at the C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A., the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon:
the fight over who lied us into war. The C.I.A., 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 C.I.A. and passed it on to Scooter.
He forced the C.I.A. to compromise one of its own, a sacrifice on
the altar of faith-based intelligence.
Vice spent so much time lurking over at the C.I.A., 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.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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