Crossposted from FDL.

Over at Jane’s they’re also brainstorming the title. My working title is â€16 Words†(thus the title of this post). But there are some very good suggestions over there.

I’m happy to hear about the book, emptywheel. Looking forward to it.

I’ll think on why I’m interested in the story and maybe append something better later. . . . But the ultimate motivation (the reason I raised both eyebrows when I read that first David Corn piece about the Novak column) boils down to something lame and vengeful like, â€I thought the Plame story held the chance, however slim, that a few of these Bush people might actually be brought to justice for all the damage they’ve caused over the years. Impunity, meet punity.â€

Right now, I’ve lost the pulse of the Timeline, with the Armitage piece thrown in and the contortions of the Libby testimony. Your recent piece about the N.E.I. was helpful, but it’s still hard for those of us with regular minds to see how this and that connect to that and this last thing. We all think you can connect a lot of these dots, while we stay lost in the mud.

None of us doubt Libby’s lying. What’s not clear is how to sort out what is his routine cover his own ass lying and what is his more primary deceit to cover up the conspiracy inside the White House itself. It would also be helpful to â€thread†Cheney’s and Bush’s revelations â€I authorized blah blah, but I didn’t blah blah†– something like Murray’s July article with editorial comments. It feels like neither Bush nor Cheney is being straight, but it’s confusing what isn’t exactly Kosher.

I find myself hanging on your, Murray’s, and eriposte’s every article, but the â€big picture†eludes me. It matters to me like dreams matter to a psychoanalyst. It’s very confusing and disguised, but it feels like the â€the royal road,†sort of like â€follow the money†in the Watergate movie.

â€16 words†is pretty good. I also like quoting Valerie, â€a few reckless individuals†or her lawyer â€not for atribution.â€

viget

Oh, that’ll be in there, if I can get it past the editors.

It’ll be a dead tree version, orion. To get to all those people who haven’t discovered the Toobz yet.

I love the title 16 words!! That’s when I first got interested in this case. When he made those statements and there were naysayers as to whether it was true. My thought at the time was that he lied. At the time, there was talk of â€treasonâ€. To me, there is no worse crime than to lie us into a war. That’s like lying someone into murder. It’s so wrong.

I don’t like wars. I am not black and white about this…there is a season for everything. But wars should be given at least as much thought as an anti abortion rally, for goodness sake!! I felt the administration had not let the investigators do their work. Though the words weren’t always direct it was obvious to me that David Kay was frustrated. I also thought the suicide in Britain was fishy (although this has never come up in the course of dirty laundry…maybe he was just a wacko…but I wonder if he was sent over the edge by these lies.)

When we go to war, people are murdered in my name. They are killed because I voted for the politician, I helped select the representatives, I voted on bills that support or do not support the feds. This is america. In my opinion he put blood on the hands of every american. My only relief is that the democratic/representative system was hi jacked. In my opinion the only way to restore our integrity is to charge him with treason and war crimes. I have a feeling that this action would tell the world what is great about America. I want our country to be a country about attraction not promotion. Most of the time it is attraction but the muslims have some good points about our record on violence. The only way to restore faith…is integrity. The only way to do what we say, and say what we mean is to follow through on the values that built this country. This is the behavior of a despot not a democratic leader.

You know it’s as if during the american revolution we decided to fight the indians instead of the british. That’s what this has felt like.

I was okay with afghanistan. I don’t like war, but I knew that I hated the taliban. I had been following them for years. I felt okay about getting Bin laden. But the bottom line is that he lied, and those 16 words are exactly what the Plame case has always been to me!!

I wish I had the details and the investigative mind that many of you have. I dream to be a sluethe but it’s just not in me. My strength is the big picture and big patterns. But thank god for the likes of you E.W and mimikatz and Jane, so many others. You all have been my only sanity. I have waited with bated breath for 3 years for this thing to unfold and finally tell me what my gut already knew. I lurked on many different web sites over the years since the war began but this web site clearly had the facts. Thank you to all these web sites that literally helped me find the floor, and the ground so that I could get up and walk straight each day. The american people need truth, just like we need oxygen.

â€obessed†are ok as long as you don’t date or marry them.

ew,

I have a title suggestion: Never Forgive

You just plaster George H. W. Bush’s quote on the front cover:

I don’t care how long I live, I will never forgive Philip Agee and those like him who wantonly sacrifice the lives of intelligence officers who loyally serve their country.

I started reading TalkLeft and FDL because they were taking time to explain the legal procedures of a very complicated case instead of framing everything in a political context. The interplay between ReddHedd’s prosecutor posts and Jeralyn’s defense posts really illuminated the legal process to me in a way that was new and fact-based.

The telling of this complicated story was well-served by hyperlinks to original source documents (eRiposte, SSCI, Fitzgerald’s filings, Comey’s appointment of Fitz) and earlier news reporting (Pincus, Novak, Miller, Time, etc.) What would otherwise be a haystack of undigestible information to a lay citizen like myself became understandable online. In the medium of TV and newsprint there was no ability to distill such detailed information into a manageable report. In blog posts it was all there, source documents labeled as source documents, speculation labeled as speculation, the mystery there to be solved by anyone and everyone with the time to contribute any detail in a blog comment. I can’t match the comprehensive understanding of Jeralyn, Emptywheel, Murry Waas, or eRiposte but I could (and did) spend an hour or two reading White House briefings by Steven Hadley on the 16 words and share my thoughts in a blog comment. And then others could dissect my contribution and add or subtract as needed.

Emptywheel’s clearly labeled speculation wasn’t salacious so much as the best mystery writing or a game of Clue. The ’leakers’ were narrowed down like a game. It wasn’t Colonel Mustard in the Ballroom with the Candlestick, it was Secretary Rice, on Air Force One, with the baited briefing – Condi: ’And you should ask the Agency at what level it was known in the Agency.’

I learned all kinds of neat and useful new terms and ideas following TNR, FDL and TalkLeft. ’The Four Corners of the Indictment’, ’Brady material’, ’Jencks material’, and how ’an Information’ differs from ’an Indictment’. None of this was in most reporting and all of it was useful in understanding what was going on with the leak investigation. I learned that I can some legal filings and Judicial rulings read like great magazine pieces and I can cut out the Rita Cosby’s and Larry King’s of the world from giving me legal news by reading it myself. I learned on blogs that DC cocktail conversations repeated on TV are less reliable than reading the court filings for myself.

It feels good to be an informed citizen and reading Emptywheel, ReddHedd, Jeralyn and the commenters here and all over the blogs made me feel like I was part of the government as a citizen, that the law wasn’t something above me or beyond me but FOR me.

That felt great.

Thank you Emptywheel, thank you ReddHedd, thank you Jeralyn.

WO

It’s a pity Agee isn’t more recognizable. Because it’d be fun to put Libby and Agee on the same cover.

Swopa

Thanks for the update–if nothing else, that’ll make it easier to rule out him being a deliberate patsy. And maybe once he starts testifying, it’ll be harder for the others to do so.

Saltin

I think Kagro X would kick me out of the blog if I didn’t include that.

ew – My path to you and Plame was Huffington to FDL to you. That was almost a year ago.

I knew of and had followed Plame, peripherally, since Novak’s betrayal. I knew a prosecutor was assigned and Judy Miller was in jail. Since I wasn’t well informed at the time, I couldn’t figure out why a reporter, who all I read about was â€didn’t write a story but was a contributorâ€, was in jail. It didn’t really bother me for some reason.

I felt a sense of strength from the prosecutor, not bullying/suppression. I also remember the judges Fitzgerald went before were having a cow everytime one of them saw his case.

I think the story really picked up when Judy’s release was forthcoming and that provided the background I had been missing and the uglyness of it.

It matter’s to me because:

Who – the President of the United States, the Vice President of the United States and their co-conspirators

What – participated in illegal, immoral, and traitorous acts

Where – within, arguably, the most prestigious government building that belongs to the people of the United States of America

When – over a long period of time

Why – for domination, power, control

How – by taking advantage of human nature

They must be held accountable.

I’m sure my sister still doesn’t get it and I’m not leaving the country because I do.

And I just dropped some cash for you at FDL. Let’s make this happen!

EW, this book project is awesome and I can’t wait to read your work in book form.

As for blog-based scoops, I recall Josh Marshall doing some digging on Novakula’s use of the term â€operative†in his original column and his later (lame) attempts at walking back from that term’s obvious meaning and the obvious implications of his use of that term — namely, that Novak and his sources knew Plame’s undercover status.

Here’s the link:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.c…..php#002062

Marcy, mega-best wishes on the book, and not a minute too soon. If you need to swipe a visual primer of the whole mess, the elementary school version from last October, â€Mr. Leaker and Mrs. Wilson†is yours for the taking. Go get ’em!

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/10/24/174045/35

fouro

My route to Plame and to TNH was circuitus. I read about the Niger forgeries in Italy, and was amazed, but did not connect the dots (and surely we would not go to war on evidence consisting of one set of documents). I read about Plame, and was outraged, but classified info is leaked alot, and there was that rumor that Phame was not a NOC. I started reading blogs – Huffington, then Kos, Greenwald, Firedoglake, TNH… Then wiretapping, Dec. 17th. As a witness in a case that got rolled into COINTELPRO that reactivated me. Revealations of torture have ignited me.

Plame for me has been a case study in Consititutional Law and American empire, almost all of the discusions have had me saying at one point or another ’But they can’t do that, can they?’ The NIE declassification was one example. I have learned a lot about how the intelligence system works, and how it can itself be worked (Judy was coached by Libby who was coached by (probably)Cheney who was using cherry-picked stovedpiped info). Knowledge of these chains of commands has been useful when looking at Bolton/NSA, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the black sites and many other scandals.

Something the blogs bring to the table that regular media does not: patience, the slogging work that it takes to research and to parce each action with each motive with each person. It is the patience that eventually will rule, even if ’sand is thrown in the umpires’ eyes’ and there are enough psych ops to blind a million minds, patience will get through the obstacles.

I have two tertiary suggestions for your first book:
1) have a fold out, colored time line
2) color code some of the script, purple for known lies, yellow for parsing, green for original documents, blue for events, or something like that and have the colors relate back to the colors on the time line.

Thanks for all your work. Good luck, and of course I’ll buy your book.

In the 80s I was too busy with small business and small children to be able to track Iran-Contra; but now that I have more time, I’ve been able to read a lot about the Plame outing — mostly here. And I hope you will be able to include something in the preface about similarities in the cast of characters — and the incredible irony and shamelessness of a group of people who wrap themselves in the flag but sell out the Constitution and our moral standing among other nations.
But your blog has not been so much about drawing conclusions as amassing evidence — with the most careful academic precision — and then sifting it carefully for meaning, listening and responding to comments from others, and then sifting it again. This is something that most reporters no longer have time to do — in a world of where shrinking newspaper circulation has generated a new set of corporate priorities for news coverage, and shrinking news holes and smaller staffs eat away at the resources newspapers have for reporting.
Watergate unfolded in the first year of our marriage, and my husband and I — both reporters in those days — watched mesmerized every lunch hour and every night as Sam Ervin and the Judiciary Committee — and the WaPo — deconstructed the convenient â€non-story†of the breakin. The Plame story — and the underlying story of how we were lied into Iraq — has always struck me as a reprise of that — as well as of Iran Contra — but this time the research is taking place largely in the blogosphere. And so much of it right here.
Best of luck with the book — and thanks for doing what you do.

Blogs are usually limited to a handful of fonts and a bit of basic html. Visual boredom. The chief advantage of the online world is the linking ability to add layers of depth to any page.

When you go to the dead tree version, you have many, many more ways to organize and display information. (There are a couple of recognized books on displaying massive and/or confusing data so that it makes sense.) You can use type and color of paper as well as colored fonts, or you can color the edges like the phone directory.

You don’t want to completely lose the linking ambience as a way of gathering information by leaping to another relevant section. I can think of a couple of solutions. One is cheap: an atlas might have numbered triangles indicating that (for example) you can follow the river east by turning to page |34> . You can use a variety of symbols to indicate what sort of information will be found at the â€linkâ€â€¦ such as a square for an original document, circle for a photo, shield for a court filing, etc..

The other method is more expensive: include a searchable CD of the reference materials. One of the many projects I worked on was the â€Core Rules†CD for AD&D. If you know anything at all about role-playing, you know that it is complicated, with dozens of books detailing all the arcana (in both a literal and figurative sense). The CD had full copies of the basic books so that a player could search, gather and print only those sections needed for his/her character. With a searchable CD, somebody curious about Addington’s off-the-cuff legal opinions, or meetings between Rove and Tenet, or whatever, could gather up all the citations from raw data such as appointment calendars through court filings to final commentary in the blogosphere and print out their own subsections. A baseball fan might go to a game armed with background on all the players… well, trial viewers might want scorecards, too. ;^)

Speaking of which, something else which will be important to people who haven’t been following this story since it broke: a â€rogues galleryâ€. Pictures of each relevant person (not just the supposed law-breakers), supplemented with basic information: job, lobbying links (profit from continuous war?), past jobs, mentors and associates, etc., anything which would show motive for involvement. This can also be color-coded (blue for courts, red for reporters, green for government, whatever). With 2 Novaks involved and various spouses as lobbying links, anything which helps a novice fill in the background behind the myriad related and unrelated names will be useful.

Best of luck pulling this together!!!

Carolly

I’m a fan. I can’t wait for the book. For me, at core, this story fascinates because it is a mystery. Unlike some mysteries that will never be solved, this one has a chance to be, especially if the facts are not forgotten, swept under the rug or pardoned away as happened with Iran Contra. I will never forget how disillusioned I became when the Iran Contra scandal went away with hardly a whimper. (Imagine my surprise to discover all the players coming back for a reprise. A second chance to find justice!)

In addition to the mystery of nefarious things happening behind closed doors of a bureaucracy, there is almost an artificial quality to the unknowns, because they are not really â€unknown,†as say, ancient Egypt or Jack the Ripper; all the players are alive and able to speak about what happened, so plying the crowbar to those closed doors and forcing the truth out into the light is such a tantalizing promise. Please, help us get a happy ending this time! Please help these dangerous secrets be known!

I’m not a lawyer or anything like that. I had an English major’s education, so to me, this story is the classic tale of hubris and power. The sheer audacity of lying the nation into war to satisfy sometimes very personal goals (showing up daddy, padding the pockets, trying to play out one’s own pet world view on the global stage) is an arrogance that begs to be taken down by justice and reality. And if, as you speculate, this leak was as much about punishing Valerie for her intel as it was about punishing Joe Wilson for his op-ed piece — well, that just ties everything in a neat bow.

I want these people to answer for their arrogance. I want the truth to be known. Anything you can do to enlighten the world and media about that is appreciated and highly anticipated.

Mickey said :guess I’d also like to understand Cheney’s role in all this (wouldn’t we all!); exactly how much power does he wield, what does he actually believe ideologically vs. what does he â€believe†as a result of his Halliburtian ties and desire to be a war profiteer. And how does all that fit in with his decision to out a spy

I don’t know maybe EW has written about this before. I think Cheney, besides greed, had motivations for Halliburton because he went out of there on such a low note. I believe he outed Ms. Plame to â€send a message†to anyone else who thought they would dissent the admin policies.
His purchase of Dresser Industries as VP of Halliburton was a bust-the company was sued over asbestoes claims. What better way to â€make it up to his buds†than to rip off the government in billions of unbid contracts? As well as line his own pocket with his still-owned, matter of congressional record Halliburton stock? The value shot up more than 3,000% in a years time with those contracts.
The chief procurement officer of those unbid contracts (which included Katrina) were being â€taken care of†by David Safavian, who was the first person arrested, and the first defendant to face a jury, in the Jack Abramoff lobbying and corruption scandal. His trial started May 25, 2006. Guilty verdicts on four of five felony counts of lying and obstruction were returned June 20.

I second the comments of Jon and sailmaker. IMO, what the blogs brought to this story was encompassed by The Plame Panel at Yearly Kos. I was not able to attend YK, but I watched the CSpan presentation several times. It was an extraordinary journalistic event, bringing together a U.S. Ambassador, a former CIA agent, an attorney, a blog journalist, and a MSM journalist, each with a different perspective on a complex and complicated story. Who in the MSM would ever have attempted to seek out the truth and analyze the issues in just such a way? Only the blogs could have supported and encouraged this type of forum. I think the transcript of the Plame Panel should be included as a chapter in the book.

I came to your site because of Huffington and Christy links, and was immediately struck by the intelligent, careful analysis you gave as events were unfolding in the wake of the Fitzgerald Investigation. From the beginning, from the first assertions in the Administrations arguments for war, I smelled a rat. It was so outlandish, for anyone to believe
that a country like Iraq had the ability to launch a ICBM which could reach this country in a few minutes, not to mention all the other tamer arguments. The fact that Plame was working on WMD led me to suspect that her interests were wider than Iraq, and, as Bush began to beat the drums against Iran, I smelled a new rat. Marcy confirmed my suspicions, as well as others on the web, who were reporting, carefully, digging deeper than the MSM.

From Wikipedia’s 16 words entry, the following:

Larisa Alexandrovna of The Raw Story reported that three intelligence officials, who spoke under condition of anonymity, told her that â€While Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss has not submitted a formal damage assessment to Congressional oversight committees, the CIA’s Directorate of Operations did conduct a serious and aggressive investigation.†According to her sources, â€the damage assessment…called a ’counter intelligence assessment to agency operations’ was conducted on the orders of the CIA’s then-Deputy Director of the Directorate of Operations, James Pavitt.†Alexandrovna’s sources described the findings of the assessment as showing â€significant damage to operational equities.†Alexandrovna reported that while Plame was undercover she was involved in an operation identifying and tracking weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran, suggesting that her outing â€significantly hampered the CIA’s ability to monitor nuclear proliferationâ€. Her sources also stated that the outing of Plame also compromised the identity of other covert operatives who had been working, like Plame, under non-official cover status. These anonymous officials said that in their judgement, the CIA’s work on WMDs has been set back â€ten years†as a result of the compromise.[65]

The outrage I have felt from the beginning, that a person in the CIA, working for our national safety could be so cavalierly discarded in the interest of politics has been echoed in EW’s posts, and as a citizen who loves her country, I am deeply grateful for EW’s persistence and dedication to righting the wrong done to a woman who had given her best for our common good. The damage done to our intelligence on the ground is immeasureable, just when we need it most, to verify the validity of claims against Iran’s nuclear capability.

The trial of Libby, I hope, will focus the attention of the public on this most important part of the story, and your book will do that magnificently, I am confident.

Blogscoops: Your insights are days ahead of msm, on facts in msm, as well as built on facts you develop in threads.

Blog-only contributions: Warmth of conversation takes investigative and collaborative reporting to the next level.

Importance: Beginning with Dean’s campaign in 2004, online collaborative work clearly was the caucus of our time.

TNH has the best orthography on the internet; its authors provide their writings without the biographical frills. I went from seeing Dean adapt to employing the internet’s instantaneous connectivity to occasionally my visiting dKos, then to the more documented TNH, but continue to gather information in lots of other places. In fact, for me, research is what it is all about now, and less about blogging. The internet is a good place to learn and to investigate.

I think the two titles already selected for the book demonstrate a simple seriousness, although, reading here and even at FDL, a background of humor is visible. Sixteen Words fits on a marquee; so would Spook Joy War, though there is little humor in many of the outcomes which the excellent reporting at many websites like this have revealed.

Luke at WotIsItGood4 asked us to come and suggest a title. â€16 Words†is pretty good, but if you don’t like it, a suggestion is to find a word or phrase from the text you like better and use that. I hope you’ll use my suggestion, because if you do I can win a wonderful prize.

Also, I hope you’ll all read my debut posts at WotIsItGood4: Part One and Part Two. I think it’s the most important thing I ever wrote. Thanks!

How about â€Cocktail Weenies: Anatomy of a White House Leakâ€