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entire Brewster-Jennings WMD counter-proliferation network--putting all of its agents and contacts at risk of getting killed, and disabling all of its projects--was about, or was mainly about, punishing Joseph Wilson for his op-ed piece in the NYT. Too much risk, too much haste and panic in the way they did it. Something is burning beneath the surface here, that may not show up in emails, but might be found in other documents under the massive secrecy lid they've placed over everything they've done.
It wasn't just public criticism they were worried about. (And what did they care? --they had/have control of the war profiteering corporate newsstream!). I think it's more to do with WHO cooked up the Niger forgeries, and WHY they really did it (--why were the forgeries so easily detectable?), and what the Niger forgeries might have been connected to, at the other end of the plotting, after the invasion of Iraq. If the guesses of good commentators/investigators are correct, the Niger forgeries were arranged way back in 2001, at the Rome meeting of Michael Ladeen and other Neo-Cons, Italian fascists, and notorious Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. And what was their purpose in creating "crude," easily detectable forgeries, with the names and dates wrong? Their purpose could have been to fool people just long enough to get Iraq invaded. But still. It seems more likely to me that the "crudeness" was deliberate--an enticement, intended to be exposed--maybe to draw the CIA and others into a no nukes in Iraq position, and then...
...to trump that position by a "find" of WMDs in Iraq, planted there by the Bush cabal. Thus, the CIA (which distrusted and banned Ghorbanifar, and was engaged in trying to gather REAL intelligence) would be discredited, and the Bush junta would gain overwhelming political advantage--vindication, justification for its heinous invasion of Iraq.
I don't think this is a simple story--forged documents, trumped up case for war, and anger at Wilson's criticism because he was exposing the lies. It may be all that Patrick Fitzgerald needs to indict the lot of them on perjury and obstruction, as well as on outing CIA agents. But I think the outing itself was a cover-up--of a Bushite plot that started two years before (and maybe more), to invent the whole story of Iraq nukes including the placement of nukes in Iraq, to be "found" by US troops (led around by faux reporter and NYT warmonger Judith Miller, after they kicked the UN inspectors out). That's where they were going with this fantasy public narrative. What stopped them?
Somebody--possibly somebody in the Brewster-Jennings counterproliferation network--may have foiled their dirty scheme to plant weapons in Iraq, and the outing would in that case be an act of revenge as well as an attempt to silence any internal dissent. And when you look at the dates of David Kelly's whistleblowing and death, you have to wonder if he wasn't involved as well, in foiling or attempting to expose this deeper plot. He was the BBC whistleblower, one of the Brits' chief WMD experts, who was mysteriously outed to his bosses in late June, 2003, was interrogated at a safe house the first week of July, and was then found dead, under highly suspicious circumstances, on July 18, four days after Plame was outed. His office and computers were then searched, and, four days later, on July 22, Brewster Jennings--the entire CIA counter-proliferation project--was ADDITIONALLY outed, also by Novak.
There are a number of things that Plame/Brewster-Jennings might have been tracking (it was recently revealed that Plame/BJ were tracking Iranian nukes--that it was Iranian nukes that the Bush junta didn't want any good intelligence about). Or Cheney arms dealings. Or 9/11 money. It could be that they were a general threat to Bush junta war-making and money-making schemes. But I tend to think that it was something specific and dramatic--an immediate danger of exposure--that prompted the Plame/BJ outings, and possibly David Kelly's death as well.
I tend to doubt that these emails will reveal much about the deeper plot. For one thing, they wouldn't likely be talking about it in emails. For another, emails can be invented, seeded with disinformation, forged and so on. Let's hope that, if they did forge some emails to cover up the deeper plot, they turn out to be as "crude" as the Niger forgeries, and present some red flags as to where else to look, and at what.
Libby says, in some court document or other, that there was a "war" between the junta and the CIA. That seems pretty clear. But what isn't often said is that this "war" seems to be between those who want to instigate war and those who think it is their job as public servants to prevent war, not to manufacture it. Those who WANTED war--Bush, Cheney, Libby, Rumsfeld, Rice et al--beat up on those who did not, at the least put their lives in danger, and maybe even killed some of them. Joe Wilson took the brunt of it in public. Plame, Kelly and others were taking the brunt of it behind the scenes--trying to do their jobs, and getting done in by their own governments.
How anybody can look at this junta's activities, and believe that they retained power in 2004 by legitimate means, is not only staggeringly blind about the election system that Tom Delay and Bob Ney arranged--with Bushite corporations "counting" all the votes with "trade secret," proprietary programming code, and virtually no audit/recount controls--but they are also staggeringly naive, or are themselves exceedingly corrupt, or maybe fearful. Bear in mind that, throughout all this Niger/Iraq nukes crap, and Colin Powell's speech, and the "aluminum tubes," and Rice's "mushroom cloud," and all the scary lies, 58% the American people opposed the invasion of Iraq (Feb. '03). They weren't fooled. Their votes weren't counted, that's all. And they're only just catching up with THAT crime.
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