Although you’d never know it from the torrent of words spoken and written thus far, no one but Peter Fitzgerald and his extraordinarily close-mouthed team of prosecutors really knows much yet about what turn the celebrated Plame case will take this week. Two things are clear, however: first, that the leaks Fitzgerald is investigating can best be understood as part of an ongoing, wide-ranging pattern of “information warfare” practiced by the Bush-Cheney Administration; and second, that investigation itself, having begun as a narrow look at a specific leak, can now best be understood as part of a broad attack on the public’s right to know.

Representative Curt Weldon, Republican from Pennsylvania, has declared war on his own Defense Department. Upset with the Defense Intelligence
Agency over its continuing refusal to allow public scrutiny of the controversial Able Danger ‘information warfare’ program (which identified Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers a year before the World Trade Center attacks,) as well as transparent DIA attempts to smear whistleblower Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, Weldon is calling for a full “felony investigation” of DIA’s actions by the Defense Department Inspector General.

Of all the astonishments in the Judith Miller/New York Times chapters of the Plamegate affair, perhaps the most revelatory is the way Miller described herself and her activities within the paper’s supposedly staid, controlled newsroom. As noted in the paper’s own long-awaited explanation of the affair, Miller called herself “Miss Run Amok.”

After revoking the security clearance of Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a key figure in the ongoing Able Danger ‘information warfare’ controversy, Department of Defense officials - apparently inadvertently - sent at least six classified documents to the whistleblower.