It’s our picture of the world. The United States is a peculiarly insular society. Most people here haven’t traveled very much and our mass media, all television news of any significance, is controlled by about five corporations. We have a tradition in the State Department and our press corps of preferring generalists and being suspicious of deep expertise as a form of bias. So a journalist covering Iraq, who knows the Middle East well and knows Arabic, might well be seen as someone too entangled with the region to be objective. The American way of ensuring objectivity is to parachute generalists into a situation and have them depend on local informants. The whole theory of it is wrong. The BBC, for example, wouldn’t dream of having most of its Middle Eastern coverage done by people who don’t know Arabic.

Good interview with a leading voice on the Middle East at Mother Jones.

No Final Report Seen in Inquiry on C.I.A. Leak

By DAVID JOHNSTON
and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 - The special counsel in the C.I.A. leak case has told associates he has no plans to issue a final report about the results of the investigation, heightening the expectation that he intends to bring indictments, lawyers in the case and law enforcement officials said yesterday.

The prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, is not expected to take any action in the case this week, government officials said. A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, Randall Samborn, declined to comment.

Ok, so we can keep the champagne chilling a bit longer, thats fine. Fitzgerald has three options at the conclusion of his investigation. He can indict, file a report, or do nothing. I’m not alone in guessing it’s #1.

Ok, no indictments today, but what have we heard recently?

First, White House Watch: Cheney resignation rumors fly

This scenario has Cheney stepping aside, and Condi being named as VP. Oh yeah, a single black woman as Veep is really gonna go over well with “the base”…

Larry Johnson, former CIA analyst, has this to say on the possiblity of indictments:

Had lunch today with a person who has a direct tie to one of the folks facing indictment in the Plame affair. There are 22 files that Fitzgerald is looking at for potential indictment . These include Stephen Hadley, Karl Rove, Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney, and Mary Matalin (there are others of course). Hadley has told friends he expects to be indicted. No wonder folks are nervous at the White House.

And this bit sounds promising. According to Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com:

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,”

And he’s sharing it with the investigation into Larry Franklin and AIPAC- you know, the OTHER espionage case in Washington currently. We live in interesting times.

I have seen this before on my Ink 19 buddy BV’s blog, but hells bells, I’m linked off of the Washington Post:

Ink 19 :: Truth To Power, Oct 18
… is set to report in Tuesday editions that a well-placed source interviewed by the newspaper believes a senior White House official has flipped and may be helping the prosecutor in the case, RAW STORY has learned. Leading to what? How about Cheney? Cheney’s Office Is A Focus in Leak Case Sources Cite Role Of Feud With CIA Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus As the investigation into the leak of a CIA agent’s name hurtles to an apparent conclusion, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has zeroed in on the role of Vice President Cheney’s office …

Posted Oct 18, 2005 04:27 am in Ink 19 :: Truth To Power 1 link

Damn! Big time!

Has anybody seen my lady
This living alone will drive me crazy

New York Daily News source believes senior White House official has flipped in leak case

The case of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame is set to explode.

The New York Daily News is set to report in Tuesday editions that a well-placed source interviewed by the newspaper believes a senior White House official has flipped and may be helping the prosecutor in the case, RAW STORY has learned.

Leading to what? How about Cheney?

Cheney’s Office Is A Focus in Leak Case
Sources Cite Role Of Feud With CIA

Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus

As the investigation into the leak of a CIA agent’s name hurtles to an apparent conclusion, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has zeroed in on the role of Vice President Cheney’s office, according to lawyers familiar with the case and government officials. The prosecutor has assembled evidence that suggests Cheney’s long-standing tensions with the CIA contributed to the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame

Reuters is saying possible indictments Wednesday. Don’t hold your breath, but hey, the sooner the better.

Read this last night, and one snippet caught my attention:

Lamb had a related question for Card in his C-SPAN interview:

“CARD: He is feeding a giant monster called the media. And they are insatiable. And if he were not out there providing information for them, they would probably be scratching at doors that they shouldn’t scratch at. “

Ok, Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, what doors should the press NOT be scratching at? Plame? Iraq? Halliburton? Chavez? The list could get quite long, if you have that sort of adversarial mentality.

Has another Bush doctrine bitten the dust?

David E. Sanger writes in the New York Times: “For most of the 30 months since American-led forces ousted Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration has argued that as democracy took hold in Iraq, the insurgency would lose steam because Al Qaeda and the opponents of the country’s interim government had nothing to offer Iraqis or the people of the Middle East. . . .

“But inside the administration, that belief provides less solace than it once did. Senior officials say the intelligence reports flowing over their desks in recent months argue that even if democratic institutions take hold, the insurgency may strengthen. And that possibility has created a quandary for an administration that desperately wants to equate democracy-building with winning the war, but so far has not been able to match the two.”

You cannot force democracy at the point of a gun. Even fraudulent democracy.

Drug traces found in water pose problem for wildlife

Over the last two years, scientists working on the Potomac River have netted 111 smallmouth bass with bizarre sexual traits. The fish were males but had eggs growing inside their testes.

In Georgia and Mississippi, scientists recently discovered that the antidepressant Prozac, in water downstream from sewage plants, can kill tadpoles, stunt the growth of others and befuddle the survivors so they swim in circles and can’t flee from predators.

Cheney May Be Entangled in CIA Leak Investigation, People Say

Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) — A special counsel is focusing on whether Vice President Dick Cheney played a role in leaking a covert CIA agent’s name, according to people familiar with the probe that already threatens top White House aides Karl Rove and Lewis Libby.

Oh no, not Big Dick Cheney! Dr. Evil can’t be involved, can he?

Rove thought facing perjury charge;
Will resign if indicted

New York - Karl Rove has a plan, as always. Even before testifying last week for the fourth time before a grand jury probing the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity, Rove–who as senior adviser and deputy chief of staff runs a vast swath of the West Wing–and others at the White House had concluded he would immediately resign or possibly go on unpaid leave if indicted, several legal and Administration sources familiar with the thinking tell TIME.

The same scenario would apply to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Vice President’s chief of staff, who also faces a possible indictment. A former White House official says Rove’s break with Bush would have to be clean–no “giving advice from the sidelines”–for the sake of the Administration, TIME’s Viveca Novak and Mike Allen report in this week’s issue of TIME (on newsstands Monday, Oct. 17).

How nice that they would resign if they get indicted. Actually, I think getting frogmarched out of the White House and tossed in jail for espionage means you lose your job. At least, it probably did before Bush got in office. Now, it probably starts an automatic process for a Congressional Medal of Honor or something…