Word on the street is that somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-5 indictments are in the offing in the Plame CIA outing case which is coming to an end after what seems like an endless two year investigation by Patrick Fitzgerald. I want indictments to be handed down. I want justice meted out. I want the scumbags that have been running our country and started a disastrous war with Iraq to be sent up the river.

I haven't written anything about this (I don't recall), but I have been following the story closely, reading all the news sources, following the few and far between leaks, pouring over blogs, television reports, editorials, basically anything I can get my hands on because I really think that when all the facts come to light, this is going to be a generational story the way that Watergate was 30 years ago.

There's a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what have yous, I want to a root cause analysis, but it's too damn complex and cicular.

So the basic story, for those of you who have not been playing at home, is about 2 years ago (July 14) a few months after the invasion of Iraq, Robert Novak publishes the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA agent, in an article about her husband Joe Wilson's trip to Niger. How did this come about?

Well, Wilson was sent to Africa by the CIA (possibly at the behest of the Vice President) to investigate claims that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger. Wilson delivered an oral report to the CIA saying there was no evidence to support the claim. Bush made the claim in the 2003 State of the Union Address anyway. Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times debunking the Niger-Iraq uranium connection. Novak then writes the article outing Plame. And the CIA requests an investigation from the Department of Justice.

There are so issues here at the nexus of the story. You have the outing of an undercover CIA agent. An act of treason if it was done deliberately, an act of extreme negligence, if not. Tied up in this story, you have the entire rationle for the war in Iraq. The Administration tried to sell the war on weapons of mass destruction. Wilson was a visible threat to their house of cards and they tried to undermine his credibility (aka destroy him) by claiming his fact finding mission was "boondoggle" set up by his wife, who, oh by the way, is a covert CIA operative in weapons of mass destruction, the exact type of intelligence asset needed to fight the war on terrorism. Oops. If that isn't interesting enough, for the first 2-3 months of the investigation, John Ashcroft, the former Attorney General, was in charge. What did the administration have to fear from him? So they concocted this story that they heard the name (Plame) from reporters and not viceversa. Their hubris making them think they wouldn't get caught because Ashcroft wouldn't persue the case and the reporters wouldn't spill the beans because they would do everything to protect their sources. They would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids, and by meddling kids I mean Patrick Fitzgerald.

Ashcroft was forced to recuse himself because of a conflict of interest and Fitzgerald, a zealous non-partisan prosector was assigned to the case. Bush, Cheney et al must have shit a brick, because many of them had already testified in front of the grand jury and had made it easy for Fitzgerald to bring cases of Perjury and Obstruction of Justice even if he couldn't prove that anyone intentially outed a CIA officer. Then he started jailing reporters, forcing testimony, turning witnesses and widening the scope of the investigation to include such things as the forged documents that were presented as a proof of the Niger-Iraq connection.

Anyway, I'm tired. I had a whole day of general manufacturing compliance training today with another half day to come tomorrow. I just wanted to get something on the record before the indictments come down. I hope Fitzgerald has the evidence to indict on the outing charges. I'd be surprised if he didn't, but I expect at least Rove and Libby to be charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, maybe conspiracy, if not something even more serious. Maybe someone else? Ari Fleischer? Steven Hadley? Maybe even an unidicted co-conspirator?

If that happens what can you expect? Who knows? I would have thought the President and the VP would have severed ties with their staffers long ago. But maybe they are neck deep in this scandal themselves. They certainly have not been forthcoming despite public statements to the contrary and Scott McClellan, the White House Press Secretary is on record as saying that it was ridiculous to assert that Rove and Libby had anything to do with it before he wised up and started to refuse comment an ongoing investigation.

Certainly the Republican hyenas will be out in force attacking Fitzgerald which will be an excercise in futility or making light of the charges, as they've been doing all along. The net result, I think, will be to paint the Republican party as an institution willing to excuse treason in a time of war to defend their own and will ultimately destroy the party.