Plamegate in a Nutshell...

People have been having me explain this whole thing to them over the last several days so, I have created a bare-bones, nutshell version of what we're talking about. It's not meant to be an absolute athority, but it lays the frame work.

Think of it as Plamegate Cliffs Notes.

The most basic gist is that people working in the white house, possibly including the President and the Vice-President wanted to silence a major critic of their plans to invade Iraq. They were afraid of him because he had been sent on a trip to verify the Niger Uranium claims and concluded that there wasn’t much to them. They also feared his criticism because he had some respect on the issue dating back to when he was acting ambassador to Iraq when the first Gulf War was about to start. Saddam Hussein had essentially threatened to take the people in the American Embassy hostage and then execute them if the US invaded Iraq in 1991.

Joe Wilson went on CNN and every other international news agency from the American Embassy in Baghdad with a noose hanging around his neck and said something along the lines of, “President Hussein, I’m not afraid of you. I know where I am and I know I could die. Now if you think you’re man enough to come down here and take us, you go ahead and try.”

President Bush 41 called him a National Hero, and they remain very close.

So they didn’t want this cry saying that their reasons for starting another war were BS. So they were looking for a way to silence him. Ultimately his wife’s undercover status at the CIA was leaked to the media, and in doing so blew not only her covert status, but everyone she had ever been known to work with in the past, which was a problem.

So after he got back from Niger, he reported back to the group who has asked to find out if the Niger Uranium claims were true. He said they were not. This was in 2002.

During the 2003 state of the Union address, the President claimed Iraq was trying to buy Uranium from Niger, and Joe Wilson thought, “That’s not true. I told them that it wasn't true. Why are they lying?”

So by July he writes an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times saying as much. A little after this his wife’s covert status is leaked. It was payback, very simply.

He was going against the administration’s wishes and official story, so they ruined his wife’s career.

Except they forgot to think of him as the Joe Wilson who stood with that noose around his neck. He doesn’t take shit from anyone. It made him mad as hell and he has been on a crusade to see that whoever did it is held responsible.

The CIA was just as pissed because it jeopardized a bunch of their operations that she had been involved with in the past. Now that people knew she was agency, every operation she had ever been involved with, front companies and what not, had to be shut down. Years of work gone. So the CIA demanded an investigation.

First John Aschcroft said he would do it, but because he has associations with Karl Rove in the past there was pressure on him to name a special prosecutor which he did.

They named a Republican US Attorney from Chicago, named Patrick Fitzgerald. Like they so often do, they didn’t vet him very well. They assumed he would look into it for a couple of months and declare that there is no way to determine who leaked this information. They thought they had covered it up effectively enough that they had nothing to worry about.

Rove, Libby and the other told their version of what happened to the grand jury and then nothing happened for 2 years, or so it seemed.

But Fitzgerald is a decent, thorough, honorable man, and do you know what happened in that 2 years? He figured the whole thing out. He has it all. He has emails, memos, phone logs, and everybody’s story. He knows who’s lying and who’s not. He has them dead to rights.

They thought up until Thursday that they were safe, but when a phone call from the Special Prosecutor to Judy Miller’s attorney caused her to “discover” the notes from June 2003, their “official” story was gone.

That’s why they’re all scrambling to get back in front of the grand jury.

They’ve all been lying. They’ve all been covering.

The word on the Street is that Cheney and Bush sat in on a couple of the meeting during which Joe Wilson was discussed, and if that’ true, and anyone in the meeting testifies to that, Cheney and Bush are going down with them.

That’s the nutshell version. They’ll make a movie about this one day, and I bet it will be a good one.

-The Oklahoma Hippy