IN THE NEWS
Tom Petty sure hit the nail on the head when he sang, "The wai-ai-ting is the hardest part." While we're waiting for tomorrow's announcements, this article encapsulates why, if indictments are announced tomorrow, the story is much larger than the prosecution of a few high-level officials.
I've kept mum about the Plame case largely because I've seen how counterproductive the speculation and scrutiny can be. For example, Josh Marshall, an otherwise very bright blogger, kept tying himself in knots over possible revelations that might lead to criminal charges. This story, which until now amounted to a series of teases about what might happen, threatened to be a distraction from serious discussion of what was happening now in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Italy, the West Bank, you name it.
As the Salon piece linked above says, Fitzgerald's prosecution may set the record straight on how the Iraq invasion happened. For the sake of those alive today, as well as future generations, that alone would be an important outcome. We're already seeing how the adage that "history is written by the winners" can often be wrong. Case in point: this New York Times story ahout how the CIA really wasn't just a bunch of dunderheads, leading an innocent president into war. I'm sure that won't be the only canard that faces serious challenge in the next few months. And I'm sure that this story, which could have been written by Ambrose Bierce instead of Gary Hart, is not the only one that should have been reported, but wasn't.
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