Fair enough. Makes sense to me.
I’ve been likening this whole process to peer-reviewed scientific research – this in a less rigorous setting, obviously. But in the same way as sci., things are honed down, and corrected, to the point that the end result is incredibly valuable, and the truth is gonna come out more often than not.

I commend all you guys! ;->

The general blog is at Politics Plus Stuff.

If there is anything I can add or change, would someone leave me a comment? I find it useful for going directly to the specific testimony of any particular witness and for linking to summaries or analysis that is useful for making the details more relevant.

If there is a really good post analzing or summarizing the testimony that I have missed, please leave me a comment. All comments are copied to my email.

I don’t see how the Administration can be displeased with the Ari testimony.

LOL! Just wait! There is a famous adage about how politics is sort of like watching what goes into making sausage….you wouldn’t eat it if you saw how it was made and what went into it.

I think Ari will show that what went into the process of defaming Wilson was a bit like sausage making. It involved a large cast of characters that we would normally think would be involved in more important issues than countering a former Ambassador who exposed an erroneous statement in the SOU Speech. [WHY they were so obsessed with this particular expose…when there were many others is still a matter of theory IMO]. It seemed that their overt counters to Wilson’s op-ed were not having the traction they wanted…so they went to things like the selective declassification of the NIE (an act authorized at the HIGHEST LEVELS…by the President himself)…down to the “off-the-record” Deep background revelation of Plame’s work at the CIA.

Walton, if you had concerns, why didn’t you take action?

M BC VP of US had told me to say it, I didn’t know where I was going to go.

Evidence of a “good German”; surprised she didn’t say, “I was just following orders.”

Man! I wish that the juror (or Walton) had asked some follow up questions here.

“Do you mean that you were concerned that the VP was insisting you release what you believed to be classified material that this might put you in legal jeopardy?”

“Did that suggest that the response to the Wilson report had reached very high importance to the OVP?”

“Did the VP at any time tell you that the NIE had been declassified? Did he tell you that either he or the President had authorized the declassification?”

I think this has to work like open source software development. It’s all out in the open, they can see what we are doing, and they may be changing their efforts because of what they read here.

By “they” I mean the media, the Bush administration, the prosecution and defense — anybody with access to the internet and a vested interest in this case. There could even be “disruptive agents” watching this stuff.

I don’t think we stop discussing this case out here in the open, but I do think we need to be extremely conscious that this is not a quiet, dark, cloistered room in which we are whispering to our best, most trusted friends. We should be writing as if were going to be read by our kids and their kids, and we should be writing as if we are speaking in a public venue like a PTA or school board meeting.

(Yeah, my kids are already well-acquainted with my salty talk and my obsession with this case. Apparently my grandchildren will learn of this in detail as well…)

As for trolls: you will know them when you see them. The mods here do a fabulous job with the very worst of them, but we will have visits from “concern trolls” that leak through from time to time. Don’t engage them and they’ll typically move on.

I wonder if it was the juror whose boss said she could only get one week paid leave and if it ran over a week, he would not pay her…

I think that was the cleaning lady at the Watergate. She was already excused, no?