The Ming Report

PARDON ME

January 1, 2004 - There are a couple of dramatic cases left over from 2003 that promise to have an impact on events in 2004. One, the continuing unwinding of the “Spinning Private Lynch” story, featured the broadcast of footage shot for Iraqi television showing everybody’s favorite soldier and her best friend, Lori Piestewa, receiving medical care following their capture. The story prompted the dead soldier’s family to say, ``Let us make sure that both President Bush, his father and each of his aides and advisers get a copy of Lori dying in agony so that they realize, from the comfort of their homes, that war should be the last option,''

The other is a story rich in irony with a well rounded cast of characters involving the shadowy world of espionage, white color crime, and politics at the highest level. It is a mystery to which nearly everyone who breathes the rarified air of Washington’s press establishment knows the solution. The question: which one of the President’s high ranking political operatives fed Little Red Riding Hood to Chicago’s own conservative Wolf?

The news broke as Attorney General John Ashcroft “recused himself” from the continuing investigation and brought in a new star to head the cast, U. S. District Attorney Peter Fitzgerald, the Chicago Bulldog. Fitzgerald, who climbed the ladder through 66 rungs of defendants from the lowliest clerk in a driver’s license station to indict the Governor of Illinois, is trumpeted as just the man to head this complex and complicated investigation and discover the identity of the infamous leaker.

Lets remember that the publication of the undercover agent’s identity and the assumed identity of her cover corporation were themselves crimes. The Novak article contains all of the proof of the commission of a crime saving only the identity of the person who fed him the information. Others of the Washington press corps, including the wife of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, were reportedly fed the same information but did not publish it. The investigation is only made complex and complicated by the assertion of the discredited notion that a journalist may conceal the commission of a crime beneath a blanket immunity conferred by the First Amendment.

In this case, the ladder is substantially shorter than that the Chicago Bulldog climbed in Illinois. The bottom rung, Robert Novak, is just one step below the prime suspect. It should not take that long to climb. With 30 or more FBI interviews and boxes of documents, schedules and appointment books to bring before a grand jury it should not take that long for the Chicago Bulldog to climb.

I wonder if the Senior Political Advisor will suggest that the President use his power of pardon – in the interests of national security, of course.