Simmer for a While

There are very few red meat revelations re: Rovegate over the last few days, but as I noted Monday, this doesn't mean Karlos(er) can laugh it all off (even as Rove-kill yuks it up at fundraisers and/or cheats on his wife). However, that doesn't mean the coverup worked:

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.

In other words, Team Bush still needn't go to a sauna if they want a good sweat.

Roger Morris, writing in Counterpunch, also suggests that none other than Secretary of State Condi herself might want to keep an expensive lawyer on retainer:

[Rice's] manifest failures in the fateful months before 9/11 in meeting the principal responsibilities of the National Security Advisor-the sheer incompetence and shallowness that left so much intelligence uncoordinated, so much neglected or misunderstood-should have been enough to have run her from public office long ago, of course, were it not for her hold on this tragically flawed president, and her deplorable immunity amid the chronic political cowardice of both the Democrats and the media.

Now, however, her role in the Plame scandal cannot be ignored or excused. She alone among senior officials was knowing and complicitous at every successive stage of the great half-baked yellow cake fraud. She alone was the White House peer-and in national security matters the superior-to Rove and Libby, who never could have acted without her collusion in peddling Plame's identity. She as much as anyone had a stake in smearing Wilson by any and all means at hand. If Rove and Libby are to be held criminally or at least politically accountable for a breach of national security, our "mushroom cloud" secretary of state should certainly be in the dock with them.

Well, as they say, chicken(hawks) always come home to roost...

And whether or not Fitzgerald's inquiry leads to indictments or not (for the record, I'm inclined to think it will, otherwise, there wouldn't be ever more desperate measures looked at in order to contain him)--anyway, whether or not the investigation actually bears fruit, it's worth remembering the following:

Iraq is Team Bush's war--it's not the GWOT, it's NOT something a reluctant administration was pulled into--it's THEIR war. They bellowed for it, they DEMANDED it, in the face of literally world-wide opposition to wars of aggression. No matter--they and the people who supported it were more than comfortable to watch American soldiers and Iraqi civilians die for the greater glory of their Rethuglican party and the idiot they nominated to lead it. The lies justifying the war were/are egregious--and would be whether or not the war is figuratively blowing up in their faces (and blowing up on plenty of people in a far more literal sense). And now it should be rightfully assessed as THEIR failure. Catching Rove in the act might make for a reasonable appetizer, but the main course is the utter folly of Cheney, Rummy, and Bush, who thought they could ignore not only history, but sanity, when they decided to embark on a splendid little festival of killing. Americans should be thoroughly disgusted by this action--not only because it's been totally boneheaded in a strategic and tactical sense, but it is morally repugnant--in fact, the war embodies all we ostensibly despise about terrorists and terrorism.