ok, got it;

bush saying war crimes will be prosecuted and “there is no defense saying I was just following orders”

a keeper

Cregan, I assume you know that EW published a book regarding all the details in this case — BEFORE THE TRIAL — and then she live blogged from the press room virtually the whole trial. Many in the Mainstream Press used her book as a reference, simply because it was a comprehensive and detailed catalogue of events related to the Plame case.

As to Armitage, are you saying that a comment made to Bob Woodward, who neither reported the story at all before, during or after the trial, and thus the Armitage-Woodward conversation was unknown until Armitage reporting on himself for breach of security was revealed at the time of trial — is that an outing of a CIA NOC? Or are you in the business of counting covert outings. It strikes me that you are into the classic argument regarding whether a tree that falls in the forest makes a big bang if no one is around to hear the big bang?

From the link cited above:

The United States Code has very strict standards for what constitutes perjury. (And even stricter standards for what constitutes committing perjury while testifying for a grand jury, as Scooter Libby was charged with doing in two of the five counts against him.)  In order for a given statement to be perjury, each one of the following five criteria must be met — and if any of these criteria are NOT met, it’s not perjury:

1) The statement must be made under oath.
2) The statement must be material to the case at hand.
3) The statement must be known by its maker to be false.
4) The statement must be demonstrably false.
5) The statement must have been made with an intent to mislead.

In the next comment, we’ll compare the situations of Scooter Libby, Bill Clinton, and Natasha Toensing.

and also without that pardon cheney could have never become vice president, rumsfeld could have never become secretary of defense and the two of them would have never created false data and satisfy their sick fetish for war with Iraq

hell, the sick and maniacle fraternity known as the pnac would probably have never existed

and we would be wondering what to do with the surplus clinton amassed after reagan spent almost every stitch of middle class assets

“Why isn’t the moral of honest professionals at the CIA considered? Wouldn’t their moral be boosted by knowing that the 1% of bad officers are purged from their ranks? Who wants to work somewhere where the bosses are shitheaded scumbags who will do anything for a sense of power?”

Maryo2 — we need to take a no rose colored glasses look at what the CIA is actually there to do. Now this does not apply to the analysis side of the agency, but to the Directorate of Operations — the Clandestine side if you will. They are trained to acquire information as tasked by lying and stealing and using any necessary form of duplicity appropriate to the goals of a mission. They are also trained to cover up their efforts by lying and cheating and all the rest — disinformation in particular. They are trained to operate under false identities, to launch false flag operations, and to dispose of anyone likely to compromise this persuit of information likely to get in the way of a mission.

Moral on the operational side of CIA depends near totally on whether operatives believe they have the authorities they execute, and will be backed up by the Agency’s leadership — but at the same time, they also know that if they mess up, they may have to “go it alone” because of the need of an Administration to deny they authorized something. It is a very wierd system of both moral and loyality. It is complicated by the fact that CIA Officers work under extreme restrictions (you can’t tell your wife where you’ve been, or if you are leaving, how long you might be gone), with the result that most of them only socialize with each other, and the main activity in socialization is pretty heavy drinking. Alcoholism and spouse abuse is very much an occupational disease among many CIA Officers.

I am just putting the reality of it on the table. That world is one that has its own morality, and it is quite unlike most other social circles, including most Federal Employee Circles.

Panetta has to defend his agency, at least in the public realm. He’s got people out in the field all over the world in dangerous or potentially dangerous situations who can’t afford to question the authorities he has given them for their current mission. He can’t seem to be cutting the rug out from under them. This is his main job as Director of the Agency. If he wants to remove anyone for good cause, he has to be extremely careful — he may not know critical details about their relationships within the Agency. If you remember, when Valerie Plame was outed in Novak’s column, the first thing she did was make a list of the persons, the contacts who might be exposed now that her identity was known. Panetta has to consider that with every move he makes. It just isn’t a normal cultural environment that most of us live in, and are familiar with.

Holder doesn’t have those considerations — he has a different job description. If he has a public pushing and shoving match with Panetta, it could be just a public show. Likewise if DiFi shoves and pushes on Holder — that too could be for show, afterall she wants top CIA folk to brief her committee thoroughly and well, so she may need distance and seeming disagreement. You have to look at fairly long pieces of any CIA or Intelligence saga to really make good sense of it.