The 18-page response of the government in USA v. Libby has been filed by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, and it is illuminating. One part follows below.

“This memorandum addresses the seriousness of defendant’s offense conduct and responds to certain possible mitigating arguments identified in the Presentence Investigation Report.”

“ . . . early in the investigation, investigators learned the identities of three officials – Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Senior Adviser to the President Karl Rove, and Mr. Libby, the Vice-President’s Chief of Staff – who had disclosed information regarding Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment to reporters. What was not apparent, however, were the answers to a series of questions central to whether criminal charges arising from the unauthorized disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity as an intelligence agent were both viable and appropriate. These questions included the following:

• Were Mr. Armitage, Mr. Rove, and Mr. Libby the only government officials to disclose information about Ms. Plame’s CIA employment to reporters?
• Was each particular disclosure by the government officials to journalists deliberate, reckless or inadvertent?
• How did those government officials learn about Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment?
• What did those government officials know about the classified nature of Ms. Wilson’s employment?
• Precisely what information regarding Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment did government disclose to reporters, and to how many reporters?
• Were the disclosures made as part of a concerted effort to disclose this information? And
• Did other government officials direct or approve these disclosures?”

Good questions. I wd like to know the answers to some of these babies myself -- aside from the last two, inferences about which seem pretty much inescapable.

The congressional GOP are unlikely to help, but if the Democrats in Congress had been less occupied with how to cave in on Iraq, maybe they could have pursued that fourth question: what did government officials know about Valerie Plame Wilson’s classified CIA employment?

The public has not been told much, yet, about Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment, but she worked in Counter-Proliferation and dealt in WMD issues. It is difficult to tell from outside whether she would more probably have been more preoccupied with Iraq or with Iran, or something else. Conceivably that could matter. If, for example, she was outed and her Division partly disabled because of administration designs on Iran, the nation has a need to know it.

(This spring, one young man I know had to withdraw from college because he was called up by the Reserves; another got the call via cell phone, just before a class one morning, that he’ll be shipping out in June. The life of my nation depends on ending this falsity. The war in Iraq is among other things a betrayal of those still working on their education, by those who have already had the privilege of education. This is a betrayal even worse than massive white-collar crime, and easily worthy of the Eighth Circle; we need a Dante.)

The what-they-knew question maps onto all the others. What they knew determined what they told; was determined by what they were told and therefore by whom; and what their objectives were in discussing her identity or work to begin with. Asking what they knew also raises the question, why they knew – of the thousands of CIA employees, why were personnel in Cheney’s office even acquainted with Valerie Plame’s work?

If Joseph Wilson is the answer to that one, then we know the answer -- that Ms. Wilson was an object of interest purely and solely because of her husband. At this stage, it wd be a boon even to be sure of that, but it’s a deeply paradoxical situation for the administration – to have to defend by arguing that the only reason these people even knew of Ms. Wilson was her husband’s criticisms, actual or forthcoming. It wd be really odd if they had already started compiling some sort of dossier on her before her husband ever went to Africa – after all, they had certainly started discussing her before her husband’s column came out, although perhaps not before he began criticizing the administration.

            Surely not. But then we still don’t know who else worked in the Counter-Proliferation Division, and how much of that work was compromised or derailed. Has Congress determined that no further harm was done? Is Congress – and when I say “Congress,” I refer to a few hundred people who will be voted out of office if they don’t stop the administration’s aim for global war – even investigating the White House push for a wider war in the Middle East against Iran?

Then there’s that first question: were Armitage, Rove, and Libby our only civil officers to disclose information about Ms. Plame’s CIA employment to reporters?

If there were others, they are sitting on information pertinent to an investigation, and any other reporters planted with the item about Ms. Wilson are sitting on that information. Let’s hope the answer is none.

It was one of the oddities of the CIA leak that the White House and the Office of the Vice President chose Bob Woodward and Judith Miller to leak to. Their choice shows their rigidities; evidently they thought getting the word out would result inevitably from selected leaking to the two top newspapers in the country – the Washington Post and the New York Times – and that a media ‘trickle down’ would follow as the night the day. Give the word to two of the most prominent reporters in the U.S. and let nature take its course . . .

If so, the joke was on them. Woodward notoriously hangs on to information received through his super access for a year or two years, until his next book; and Miller apparently chose not to run with this one. Incidentally, it would be interesting to know why not. Did Miller consider the item uninteresting? Did she see through the tactic and think the administration would get itself into trouble? Was Ms. Wilson not a prestigious enough CIA officer for Miller to write about? Did Miller want to avoid directing attention to the WMD unit in CIA that cd further illuminate problems with NYTimes reporting on WMD?

Woodward and Armitage came through for the public in 2005, manfully confessing their roles in the Wilson item just before the term of the first grand jury investigating the CIA leak expired. Perhaps it looked as if they had successfully derailed the investigation. And presumably it would have worked that way -- except that with new information belatedly received, an excellent prosecutor convened a new grand jury.

And now, what other administration campaigns and false alarms are being politely covered up by large media outlets?