Reply #34: Marshall on what furriner Hitchens thinks of as a "great non-story": [View All]

[nightperson]

Plame's status is the predicate of the whole case. If she's not a person covered by the law then there's nothing even to investigate.

Yet an investigation into the matter has been going on for almost a year; and the quasi-independent Fitzgerald investigation has been underway for more than six months.

If Plame wasn't covert, the CIA never could have made its referral to Justice. If they did, that would have been the most obvious of reasons for Justice to decline to investigate. And surely Fitzgerald wouldn't have spent these months dragging members of the White House staff before a grand jury without satisfying himself that the first and essential legal predicate of the entire case (Plame's status as covert) was valid -- a factual matter that could have been nailed down in rather less than a day.

My apologies to regular readers for all the back and forth. But occasionally it's necessary.

Hitchens must have entered new, worse stage of :beer: :freak: :beer:.