It would be helpful to know

As this was being written attorney Ted Wells was knee deep into his closing argument in defense of Scooter Libby. Everyone knows the backdrop--how the CIA issued a criminal referral over the outing of Valerie Plame's classified status by Bob Novak, but what we see now represents the proverbial iceberg tip. The trial might exist in a vacuum but the story doesn't.

Let's set the flux capacitor and return to the conclusions made by the 9/11 Commission, which suggested the intelligence bureaucracies were operating in their own vacuums prior to 9/11. Conventional wisdom also said the administration and CIA were somewhat at odds over intelligence after 9/11, one of the prime reasons given for the creation of Douglas Feith's "Office of Special Plans". Feith recently defended himself during an inquest performed by CNN's Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: But what they were saying -- correct me if I'm wrong -- was that Saddam Hussein would not be involved in working with al- Qaeda, because al-Qaida didn't want to have anything to do with this secular Iraqi leader.

FEITH: What they were saying is, the CIA had intelligence, its own intelligence that was inconsistent with its theory that there couldn't be any cooperation, and the CIA was not drawing on all of its intelligence. It was filtering its own intelligence to suit its own theory. It was a proper criticism.

That paragraph might sum up what's going on here pretty well. The attack created intense finger-pointing, butt covering, and 20/20 hindsight, and careers and legacies were on the line. Americans, after all, are largely selfish.

Michael Isikoff reported in a June 2002 edition of Newsweek (I can't find on the web but copies remain at places like this, and ironically, the Congressional Record):

But Almihdhar’s name and face surfaced yet again, in the aftermath of the October 2000 bombing of the Cole. Within days of the attack, a team of FBI agents flew to Yemen to investigate. They soon began closing in on suspects. One was a man called Tawfiq bin Attash, a.k.a. Khallad, a fierce, one-legged Qaeda fighter. When analysts at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in Langley, Va., pulled out the file on Khallad, they discovered pictures of him taken at the Kuala Lumpur meeting. In one of the shots, he is standing next to Almihdhar.

If, as the CIA now claims, it wasn’t certain that Almihdhar had terrorist connections, it certainly knew it now. And yet the agency still did nothing and notified no one.

The article fails to mention the Iraqi airport greeter at Kuala Lumpur, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who reportedly helped facilitate the meeting. Ironically, the WaPo's Walter Pincus, now involved in the Libby trial, wrote in 2004 that the CIA concluded that was simply a case of mistaken identity. Yet we don't really know for sure, and such is the nature of the intelligence business.

Perhaps even more curious, Isikoff's article mentioned "Yazid Sufaat, a U.S.-educated microbiologist who had become a radical Islamist and bin Laden follower". Sufaat's condo was used for the AQ planning meeting. He was picked up in December 2001 and is apparently being held in Malaysia. Here's what his wiki says:

Sufaat was born in Johor, Malaysia and holds Malaysian Passport Number A10472263. He is a former Malaysian army captain and businessman. Sufaat holds a degree in biochemistry from the California State University, Sacramento in the United States. Sufaat is believed to be one of al-Qaeda's main anthrax researchers. [1]

Mr. Scooter was also somewhat knowledgeable about bio-weapons, helping Judy Miller with her book called "Germs". If we stop and play a little game of dot connecting we get the following--the CIA had knowledge in 2000 about a US-educated anthrax researcher and AQ facilitator and there was suspicion that Shakir was a Fedyeen Saddam agent and was also a facilitator. Those are some mighty interesting dots. Add the anthrax letter attacks in 2001 for effect, if you like.

Delving deeper, the Congressman who introduced the Isikoff article into the CR, Senator Fritz Hollings, also entered this paragraph:

Here is a news story from July 21, 2001, before 9/11 of last year, in the Iraqi news. The name of that particular newspaper is Al-Nasiriya. Quoting from it:

Bin Ladin has become a puzzle and a proof also, of the
inability of the American federalism and the CIA to uncover
the man and uncover his nest. The most advanced organizations
of the world cannot find the man and continues to go in
cycles in illusion and presuppositions.

It refers to an exercise called ``How Do You Bomb the White House.'' They were planning it. Let me read this to all the colleagues here:

The phenomenon of Bin Ladin is a healthy phenomenon in the
Arab spirit. It is a decision and a determination that the
stolen Arab self has come to realize after it got bored with
promises of its rulers; After it disgusted itself from their
abomination and their corruption, the man had to carry the
book of God . . . and write on some white paper ``If you are
unable to drive off the Marines from the Kaaba, I will do
so.'' It seems that they will be going away because the
revolutionary Bin Ladin is insisting very convincingly that
he will strike America on the arm that is already hurting.

The point of all this is to provide the reasonable notion that might have existed in some quarters about what we were facing. The Bush folks were roundly criticized for not connecting enough dots, but yet when they did people didn't like the results.

You may ask what this has to do with the charges against Libby. Nothing really, except to provide some background. Obviously Joe Internet can't know the inner-workings of any of these relationships but it's fair to say Scooter wasn't on many CIA Christmas card lists.

No matter what happens with Libby we still won't know whether, 1) the administration, fully convinced Saddam was up to his headscarf in Islamist terrorism and suspecting Langley was covering their failure to see it after 9/11, built the OSP to help better analyze the intelligence in an effort to protect America, or 2) they were using OSP to cherry-pick morsels in an attempt to justify the war on Saddam to steal his oil (or any assortment of nutroot reasons) and the CIA was patriotically trying to stop them, leaving Joe Wilson and his wife as modern heroes.

All the average person can do is carefully note the character of the characters involved on both sides and make a guess. Anecdotally observing the internet wars on this issue it seems the Wilsonian cheerleaders are usually the first to drop into condescending boilerplate rants about their opponents. Perhaps the truth will one day emerge and prove them right but chances are we'll be left with raw emotionalism. As some say, emotions are the shallowest part of a person's being.

EPILOGUE 2/20/07

My prediction is Libby will go down on at least a few counts. Wells made a fairly compelling argument about memory lapses, pointing to Russert's horrible testimony and clandestine meeting with the FBI (which is why Fitzgerald melodramatically hammered the point they could convict without him), but something Wells said at the end of his speech gave it away for me:

Don't sacrifice Scooter LIbby for how you may feel abotu (sic) war in Iraq or Bush Administration. Treat him the way he deserves to be treated. He worked every day to be NSA for this country. Analyze it fairly. Fight any temptation for your views if you're Democrat whatever party. This is a man who has a wife kid. He's been under my protection for the last month. Just give him back. Give him back to me, give him back.

That's not something you say to a conservative-leaning jury. Wells seemed to be setting his appeal case right there.

Democrats and MSM types need to keep the following things in mind. Saddam was a bad guy before Libby and Cheney arrived. Wilson and the media have managed to couch this as a condemnation of ALL the evidence provided by Powell about the WMDs. Bush didn't make this stuff up. Saddam was a bad guy. A guilty verdict would also say nothing about whether Bush blew the towers, shot a cruise missile at the Pentagon, and flew the Flight 93 passengers into Cleveland. It wouldn't conclusively answer the question about Saddam and bin Laden, nor would it take Iran and Hizballah off any hooks.

But conventional wisdom is awfully powerful, and a conviction will make it harder for Bush to press any cases from here on out. Certainly a guilty verdict would signify an official beginning of "Bush season" and provide a shiny new veneer to all subsequent investigations. Every single MSM story might contain embedded wording such as "the Bush administration, reeling from the recent conviction of a top level aid I. Lewis Libby, who lied about an revealing the identity of a covert CIA..." That will be hard for the Decider to fight, especially if cowardly members of his own party jump ship fearing political fallout.