Plame: Who Knows?

Time for the monthly ritual of, "Say, what's going on with the Plame investigation?"

Once again, nobody knows. Although Swoopa at Needlenose and Laura Rozen at War and Piece speculate on the matter and what they guess is quite logical.

Bill Gertz at Moonie Times, an organization that along with throwing great coronations for the new messiah (which Congressional Officers cannot help but attend) has a real connection to the Bush Administration [and shouldn't that tell us something] wrote this:

The identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame was compromised twice before her name appeared in a news column that triggered a federal illegal-disclosure investigation, U.S. officials say.

Mrs. Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In a second compromise, officials said a more recent inadvertent disclosure resulted in references to Mrs. Plame in confidential documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana.

The documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them, the officials said.

. . . officials said the disclosure that Mrs. Plame's cover was blown before the news column undermines the prosecution of the government official who might have revealed the name, officials said.

"The law says that to be covered by the act the intelligence community has to take steps to affirmatively protect someone's cover," one official said. "In this case, the CIA failed to do that."

Swopa believes this article really means:

That this argument is based on thoroughly unprovable allegations with no clear news "hook," not to mention being obviously implausible (Cubans secretly breaking into sealed documents show that the CIA is not trying to protect her identity?!), just underscores how unlikely it is to be suddenly showing up in a newspaper. Some Bushite official consciously researched this and handed the information to a reliably friendly reporter at this precise moment in time. Why?

I'm fortunate enough not to have firsthand experience with whether and how people being investigated by grand juries are notified of possible forthcoming indictments, but I suspect that certain steps are required to warn them of legal jeopardy. And if anyone in the White House has gotten wind of something like this, you can bet they've thought about how to prepare the media battlefield -- and that may be the invisible line connecting the dots I've just mentioned.

Laura Rozen also comments:

...does this sound like the kind of flailing, tortured legal excuse the official who is being set to be exposed or indicted is preparing? e.g. it wasn't that damaging, even if it was a technical crime, to out the identity of an undercover officer who was already "outted" to the Russians and the Cubans? Doesn't it only make them look worse? It certainly would seem to reveal the key fact: the official who outted her identity to Novak was aware that Plame was an undercover CIA officer.

And then uber blogger Josh Marshall chimes in:

There does seem to be a rush of articles aimed not simply at discrediting Wilson but specifically at arguing that there is no legal basis for a prosecution of the folks who leaked Plame's name. Who's so concerned? It makes me wonder.

I frankly have no idea what the outcome will be with Plame. I know the gist of what happened. I know its disgusting what did happen. But, whether it will lead to a criminal indictment; a thorough scolding; or not much of anything, beats me.

I know that I have a routing interest at this point, and I know what I assume [that Fitzgerald will take path #1 or #2 both politically damaging to some degree to Bush, the first being possibly catastrophic}. However, I have to admit, while Ken Starr's office was a disgusting sieve of leaks, Fitzgerald is an admirable locked-safe.

We are all just speculating -- though I have to admit I enjoy it, probably too much.