Plame case: The fate of Fitzgerald and the Niger forgeries

Antiwar.com is a good site for references on the Iraq War, and to a lesser extent on the Afghan War.  Justin Raimundo, who runs the site, seems to take an Old Right/isolationist view of foreign policy in general.  But he runs a wide variety of commentary.

One of the regular contributors is Ray McGovern, who raised a possibility that hasn't been much discussed: that Dear Leader Bush might decide to just fire the Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the Plame/WMD-fraud case: Cheney's Chickens Come Home to Roost by Ray McGovern Antiwar.com 10/20/05.  There's precedent:

When the Watergate scandal reached a similar stage in October 1973, President Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire the intrepid special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out Nixon's order; and so did his deputy William Ruckleshaus. So Nixon had to reach farther down into the Justice Department, where he found Robert Bork, who promptly dismissed Cox in the so-called Saturday Night Massacre.

Fitzgerald is at least as vulnerable as Cox was. Indeed, in recent days some of the fourth estate, Richard Cohen in the Washington Post and John Tierney in The New York Times, for example, seem to have accepted assignments to help lay the groundwork for Fitzgerald's dismissal.

Will the White House decide to fire special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and simply absorb the PR black eye, as Nixon did? There is absolutely nothing to prevent it. Can you imagine Attorney General Alberto Gonzales refusing on principle an order from President Bush?

Could Bush himself be named an unindicted co-conspirator? If that or something like it happens, we can expect a circling of the wagons and Fitzgerald cashiered.

If the case Fitzgerald has built, however, is not strong enough to implicate Bush personally, it seems likely that the president will acquiesce in the wholesale frog-marching of others from the White House and then go off for a Thanksgiving vacation in Crawford – or, more likely, Camp David. For Cindy Sheehan is planning Thanksgiving in Crawford: she still hopes to see the president so that he can explain to her personally what the "noble cause" was for which her son died.

Raimundo himself sometimes leaps to conclusions that the facts he marshals can't quite support.  But he does seem to be a careful researcher.  And he recently offered up this item: Niger Uranium Forgery Mystery Solved? The Fitzgerald/Plame investigation goes in a new direction Antiwar.com 10/19/05.  He is referring to the forgery of the Niger/uranium documents, which at least passed through Italian intelligence:

Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

Alan Wolf died about a year and a half ago of cancer. He served as chief of the CIA's Near East Division as well as the European Division, and was also CIA chief of station in Rome after Clarridge. According to my source, "he and Clarridge and Ledeen were all very close and also close to Chalabi." The former CIA officer says Wolf "was Clarridge's Agency godfather. Significantly, both Clarridge and Wolf also spent considerable time in the Africa division, so they both had the Africa and Rome connection and both were close to Ledeen, closing the loop."

He goes on to explain more about the players.  Although this is one where his mass of details starts to blur the story by the end, unless you take the time to sort through the pieces carefully.  But putting names to the forgeries may be part of the Fitzpatrick prosecution.

For longtime readers of Old Hickory's Weblog,some of Raimundo's story may ring a bell: Will the Iran-Contra Crowd Ever Go Away? 10/17/03; Iran War: Michael Ledeen 10/19/04.  I thought I should modestly mention that.