Dirty Dick & the Stovepipes

As of our Tuesday press time, word was that Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor running the investigation into the politically-motivated leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name, had vice-presidential flunkey John Hannah singing to save himself from indictment.

This is, to say the least, a very big deal. Reporting on intelligence is always murky, but Hannah-Dick Cheney's special assistant for Middle East affairs-is thought by many to be one of the principal engineers of the administration's various propaganda blitzes aimed at making people think that Saddam Hussein was in league with Al-Qaeda, had nuclear weapons and so on. If someone at this level is cooperating with the investigation, we could see its scope expand well past the CIA leak into issues of doctored and manipulated intelligence, and well past the powerful but anonymous likes of Hannah and Scooter Libby directly to the vice-president-who, rumor has it, may resign, claiming poor health.

It's not yet clear how the pieces fit together, but it is clear that the appalling Judy Miller is far from the real story, and that the pompous bureaucrat Joe Wilson and his spy wife may not be the real story, either. Instead, we could be looking at a scandal bigger than Watergate, one that will explain exactly how the administration rigged the system to make its case for war on Iraq.

Looking past the interminable Kabuki ritual that's about to unfold-leftist partisans will claim Bush needs to be impeached, while rightist partisans will claim that Fitzgerald (a Republican, by the way) is a politically-motivated hack using indictments to practice the politics of personal destruction-it's to be hoped that the prominence the scandal will give to intelligence issues will lead to a hard look at what's been done to the CIA since Porter Goss took it over.

All reporting indicates that he's staffed the agency's professional jobs with apparatchiks. Combine that with the disastrous reorganization of the intelligence community undertaken at the behest of the loudest and most loathsome of the 9/11 families, and you have a system more easily gamed than ever. By all means we should throw Cheney, Libby, Rove and theirs into the dustbin, but hopefully not at the expense of recognizing that their dastardly work has been ongoing over the last three years.