Deeper mess

On Fox News Sunday, William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, cautioned the Republican faithful of hard times to come. Citing criminal defense lawyers "friendly to the administration," he predicted indictments of "senior administration officials" in the Valerie Plame CIA leaks investigation. "I think it's going to be bad for the Bush administration," he added.

The closest thing in Washington to an intellectually honest neo-con, Kristol also lamented "the criminalization of politics." Well, cry me a river. Where were Kristol and his magazine during the late Clinton scandals? Beating the drum for Kenneth Starr and his leak-o-matic team of Whitewater fantasists and bedsheet sniffers, naturally. Fake lawsuits, phony investigations, trumped-up accusations and the lot. All justified by Bill Clinton's extravagant folly and desperate little lies, they insisted.

But Democrats shouldn't gloat. Far from being payback, this is serious business, involving grave life-and-death issues. Moreover, things could be worse than bad for GOP true-believers. The indictments of several name-brand White House aides, should they materialize, would mark the effective end of the Bush administration's ability to govern in anything but the narrowest formal sense.

What's more, if ABC News' George Stephanopoulos is correct in reporting what an anonymous little bird told him about President Bush and Vice President Cheney's direct involvement in discussions about how to neutralize Plame's husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, after he went public about false claims regarding Iraq's non-existent nukes, then there's no telling where things could end.

Kids, can you say "unindicted co-conspirator?" I thought you could.

Granted, that's a lot of maybes. All necessary, it's worth pointing out, because unlike Starr, career federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald runs a tight ship. Everything we know about the Plame investigation comes from public courtroom pleadings, journalists forced to testify about their conversations with White House aides, and the carefully spun revelations of defense attorneys.

Yet to paraphrase the first President Bush, the muck is getting deeper by the day. As in a proper investigation, persons making multiple appearances before Fitzgerald's Washington grand jury, such as Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and self-dramatizing New York Times reporter Judith Miller, have no clear idea how other witnesses have testified or what documents prosecutors have seen. Hence they're well-advised to come clean.

Miller's suddenly "finding" her notes from previously unreported meetings with Libby in June 2003 -- his carefully worded letter to her mentioned only July conversations -- is a case in point. Their very existence casts doubt on the White House's first cover story: that aides were only warning reporters off the supposedly unreliable Joe Wilson. His New York Times column charging that the Bush administration cooked the intelligence books about Iraq's WMDs didn't appear until July 6.

Wilson's book claims that the so-called "White House Iraq group," created specifically to justify war, set out to damage his reputation months earlier, as soon his apostasy on Saddam's nukes became known to them. Revealing his wife's covert CIA identity may have been a deliberate part of the plan. Encouraging hurtful coverage by Judith Miller, author of several since-discredited "exclusives" on Saddam's WMDs and a virtual de facto member of the White House team, may have seemed like a clever tactic.

Another potentially complicating factor is that key White House witnesses, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, made their first statements to FBI agents back when the Plame investigation was in the presumptively more reliable hands of Attorney General John Ashcroft. Now they have to live with them. The appointment of a nonpartisan pro like Fitzgerald must have caused sweaty palms all around.

Suspicious minds wonder if that's why Karl Rove suddenly recalled that he'd "forgotten" his conversations about Wilson and Plame with a half dozen reporters back when President Bush first asked him about it. But who's Rove's recovered memory supposed to protect? Himself or the president? Inquiring minds want to know.

But that's enough inside baseball. It's easy to get lost in the minutiae of an emerging Washington scandal and forget what it's all about. At bottom, the Plame investigation is about how the United States duped itself into invading Iraq on false pretenses, about the substitution of radical-right ideology for professional intelligence-gathering, and about ruthless political revenge against dissenters from the party line. It's CIA loyalists versus the Bush White House.

In a healthy democracy, citizens would demand to know who forged the documents that caused the CIA to send Joe Wilson to Africa to begin with. Was it an inside job? Was a foreign government involved? But the GOP-run Senate intelligence committee refused to probe the matter, and the Washington press has been too busy playing footsie with White House insiders.

Regardless of how Fitzgerald's tightly focused investigation turns out, it seems unlikely to reach the ultimate questions. But it could remind Americans that the answers couldn't be more important to the nation's future.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons@sbcglobal.net.