Instead of looking wide and deep, Fitzgerald chose to focus very narrowly on provable facts relating only to this minute aspect of the coverup. The fact that Libby, a key principal to the events, chose to lie meant that the federal probers could not get a good handle on the motivations behind the outing of Valerie Plame. Fitzgerald made plain that he wasn't about to touch the third-rail issue of the war-lies; it will be up to those who feel strongly about the war issue to tie all the threads together and make that case.
(Even though we know that Fitzgerald was interested in the original forged Niger documents alleging an active Iraqi nuclear-program -- which is why Joe Wilson was sent to Africa in the first place, to check out that story -- the Special Counsel gave no indication that his investigators would continue to delve into that explosive issue, even though the forged-documents scandal is breaking open right now in Italy.)
But in a way, though the Special Counsel's narrow focus was disappointing, the full indictment, with all the detailed facts about Libby's bullshit cover story, opens up a window through which we can glimpse the moral cesspool that was (and is) the Bush Administration in its dealings then and now with regard to the Iraq War.
In short, the Administration has been bloodied badly, but not fatally wounded. An indictment of Rove probably would have been extremely helpful in delivering that coup de grace, but, for whatever reason, Fitzgerald didn't, or couldn't, go there, and Libby looks like the designated scapegoat.
If the Congress were to establish serious and high-level investigations of the entire Plame affair, or if the House were to pass an impeachment resolution -- thus putting Administration officials under oath during depositions -- that would be the beginning of the end of Bush&Co. power. But that's not about to happen right now in a GOP-ruled Congress, and Bush/Rove/Cheney, no matter how suspect and politically-damaged, still rule from the White House. That's important to keep in mind in the next weeks and months.
GOP SPIN-POINTS AGAINST INDICTMENT
The GOP spin against Fitzgerald started even before the Libby indictment was revealed. In the main, it's designed to make light of the charges -- none for the leak itself in espionage terms, rather only about "minor" matters like lying and perjury -- and to question Fitzgerald's "partisan" motives. (Of course, when Clinton was in the dock, lying and perjury were extremely grave matters to GOP leaders, anything but "minor.")
I thought Fitzgerald handled those charges rather deftly in his news conference, saying he has no party affiliation, he was given his authority by Bush's Justice Department, and that lies and perjury concerning national-security matters are not "minor" but go to the heart of protecting the lives and cover of our spies and those with whom they come into contact.
By sticking only to the facts of this one indictment and refusing to engage in surmise outside that narrow purview -- and by having no leaks emerging from his prosecutorial team, unlike Kenneth Starr's politically-charged probe of Clinton -- Fitzgerald gave rightwing critics little on which to hang their denunciations of his investigation.
THE REAL SCANDAL IS THE WAR
I'm as consumed as the rest of you with the Libby indictment, and whether other shoes will drop. But the broader scandal right now is not which official lied to government investigators, but the war itself. Hundreds and thousands are continuing to die because of Bush neo-con lies and deceptions that took us to war in Iraq, and yet and still, with the Republicans in charge of the Congress, there are no official investigations there of how Americans were bamboozled into attacking Iraq.
Remember that Republican Sen. Pat Roberts promised before the election that his Intelligence Committee would investigate how the White House used and perhaps abused the intelligence to take the country to war, but, after Bush was declared the winner, Roberts said there was now no reason to hold such a probe, even after the bombshell revelations of the Downing Street Memos and other proofs of Bush Administration duplicity and war-crimes.
That's the real scandal and the real danger when one party controls the three branches of government. Congressional oversight is effectively abandoned, and the timid Democrats, seemingly unfamiliar with the concept of "opposition party," barely make any significant noise. The Democrats, most of whom voted for the war and continue to fund it, are essentially silent.
In addition, there is the other major scandal that basically has been swept under the rug: the shoddy election and electronic vote-counting system we have in this country that appears to have resulted in manipulated election results in 2004. Again, the Democrats are basically silent, therefore the Republicans need do nothing to find out what happened and how to prevent such electoral corruption in the future. (And why should they want to find out? They benefit from the easily-manipulated system, which is run by Republican-supporting e-voting companies.)
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