John Dean of Nixon/Watergate fame offers advice to Wilson/Plame

[Psst_Im_Not_Here]

I know this is almost 2 years old, but, I thought the suggestion that Wilson/Plame file a civil suit was interesting. What do you all think?

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More vicious than Tricky Dick
By John Dean
Salon.com

Friday 03 October 2003

I thought I had seen political dirty tricks as foul as they could get, but I was wrong. In blowing the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame to take political revenge on her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for telling the truth, Bush's people have out-Nixoned Nixon's people. And my former colleagues were not amateurs by any means.

For example, special counsel Chuck Colson, once considered the best hatchet man of modern presidential politics, went to prison for leaking false information to discredit Daniel Ellsberg's lawyer. Ellsberg was being prosecuted by Nixon's Justice Department for disclosing the so-called Pentagon Papers (the classified study of the origins of the Vietnam War). But Colson at his worst could barely qualify to play on Bush's team. The same with assistant to the president John Ehrlichman, a jaw-jutting fellow who left them "twisting in the wind," and went to jail denying he'd done anything wrong in ordering a break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, where the burglars went and looked for, but did not find, real information to discredit Ellsberg.

But neither Colson nor Ehrlichman nor anyone else I knew while working at the Nixon White House had the necessary viciousness, or depravity, to attack the wife of a perceived enemy by employing potentially life-threatening tactics.

So let me share a bit of history with Ambassador Wilson and his wife. And, well aware that gratuitous advice is rightfully suspect, let me also offer them a suggestion -- drawn from some pages of Watergate history that till now I've only had occasion to discuss privately. Long before Congress became involved and a special prosecutor was appointed, Joe Califano, then general counsel to the Democratic National Committee and later a Cabinet officer, persuaded his Democratic colleagues to file a civil suit against the Nixon reelection committee. And that maneuver almost broke the Watergate coverup wide open. In seeking justice from the closed ranks of the Bush White House, Wilson and Plame should follow a similar strategy.

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More here:
John Dean on Truthout

[peacetalksforall]

1. I think it is good advice. If there is any glint of strategy to wiggle

out of this by Cheney Gonzales Card Bartlett Hughes Matalin and PNAC or any of the other twisters and strategists...a civil suit could get them thinking.

If they did, the Wilson's would have to be extremely careful about the funding of the lawsuit. Even a pro bono would be meat for these vultures. There will just be one series after another of propaganda and dirt creation and dumping that the religious followers and swallowers will believe for decades without question. They will blame the entire affair against Cheney, Bush, and Rove on the Wilsons and their lawyers and the funders (and Clinton, of course).

[Psst_Im_Not_Here]

3. I think that

will happen regardless of a civil suit. It already is happening. Dotting the "I's" and crossing the "t's" is going to be very important throughout this thing. Everything will have to be referenced and cross-referenced. But, like Watergate a civil suit could bring tons of evidence in discovery and blow this thing wide open.

[oneold1-4u]

2. Using the courts

Could certainly be the national means of getting out all the "dirty linen" to the media and maybe they could not all ignore it.