FITZMAS WISHES

Tim G commenting in the Fitzmas thread at Road to Surfdom:

I must say that I can't really muster much enthusiasm for Plamegate. When one considers the real damage done by these people and their naive and incompetent foreign adventurism, and the thousands of people who have died needlessly as result, perjury seems like extremely small beer - it's like prosecuting Hannibal Lecter for his poor kitchen hygiene.

To which Glenn Condell responds:

This is aimed precisely at those responsible for that policy and those deaths. You can't prosecute people for naivety or adventurism. If the dead are to be avenged, or at least honored, their killers need to be prosecuted for crimes on the books.

This is a way into the prewar cooking of intelligence, that's the issue. Treason has been committed and Americans have died as a direct result of these crimes. Not to mention some Iraqis. Niger was forged either by or with the connivance of American office bearers in order to either mislead the President or do his bidding, so that he could utter the 16 words in making the case for war. There are disturbing signs the attempted smears of George Galloway, and perhaps of Scott Ritter and Hans Blix came from the same laboratories, probably in Israel and funnelled thru Feith's OSP (probably via Italian intel ops beholden to neocons and linked by Michael Ledeen) and hence to WHIG and media outlets friendly to these schemes, such as the Telegraph London, where the involvement of Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger raises questions I have unfortunately never seen asked, let alone answered, anywhere. All of these efforts were aimed at crippling impediments to the war juggernaut the gathering momentum.

Where does responsibility ultimately lie for these deceptions; how high up the food chain? How do we prevent this from occurring again? How can we re-establish a culture of official accountability in our government? And possibly, how do we stop this madness before it destroys the Republican party, a far less solid coalition of odd bods than it appears at first glance?

These are the real drivers. And it's not just perjury, it's the exposure of a spy engaged in work related to the safety of the realm for partisan and/or arse protective purposes.

I agree there are regions of irresponsibility and even further criminality across the range of Bushco activities that are more important in the long run, but I can't think of a better way of approaching the task of mending what's been broken on those fronts than the cool, relentless, pinpoint exposure of the corruption these people cheerfully indulged in so that their grand designs could be realised under false pretences.
All those people who have needlessly died, sacrificed to the ruthless, self-absorbed Leninist groupthink of the people Fitzgerald is after are, if not avenged, at least paid due respect as victims of wrongdoing with the pursuit of the people who engineered the circumstances of their deaths.

If you lie about war you'll lie about anything and I think exposure and pursuit of other issues will after this be likely to encounter far less obstruction tha previously. Katrina helped too.

Glenn will want to be careful going through the door opened for him by Fitzgerald, there's no telling where it might lead.