I think it matters because if you are going to impach somebody, you have to impeach a specific person. Same, if there were a lawsuit. As for the Hague, I don't know how this letter forgery would be an international war crime, which if I am not mistaken, is the only thing the Hague gets involved in..??? Creating propaganda and false documents is not against the geneva convention, is it? The war had already started, and been on for several months by the time this letter was supposedly forged, late 2003 (invasion was early 2003)

But it would be illegal, against US law, for the CIA to have committed the forgery, as Suskind has pointed out, its against the laws that created the CIA and the 1991 amendments to those laws, to make disinformation campaigns targeted at the American public. I don't know those laws but ill take his word for it, or maybe look them up later….

What can i say, the legal system, and the rule of law, depend on calm discussion of apparently pointless minutae I don't know of any other way to do it. We cant go chucking people into prison without specific charges, without warrants, without some kind of evidence, without some sort of jury or ability to defend oneself. If we didn't have that stuff, we'd be no better than… oh yeah. .. we do do that stuff, and it stinks to high heaven. So let's go back to the good old days, of Habeas and evidence and boring, long conversations about minute details. I would love to go back to those days. . . .

So the minutae in this case are , in my opinion as follows. It is one thing to say Bush and his crew were incompetent, that they ignored evidence, that they bungled things, set up the Office for Special Plans, etc. There is no law, thank god, against being stupid and incompetent. Uness they come up with a 'government malpractice law', like they hae for doctors or something. Maybe you could sue and prove negligence, but it would be hard… because youd have to go after the congress too, which voted for the invasion as well…. I dont know im not a legal expert.

It is quite another thing to say that a Whitehouse person knowingly lied about Saddam/Al Qaeda links, and forged a letter to help with that lie, and used the CIA to perpetrate it. That breaks all kinds of laws, and is a transgressino of a diffrent sort. People will forgive incompetence, they wont forgive a flat out lie like that.

Furthermore, it is little things like that that can get people into real trouble. Example… Nixon got away with secret bombing campaigns and all sorts of other stuff, but lying about a silly little burglary is what brought him down. Gangsters (i dont mean nixon is a gangster, im talking about the law here) have been brought down not for murders, torture, extortion, etc,m but for little things like tax evasion. Its the ittle stuff that can get these big guys some times.

Thats my take. I am no expert, just some shmoe readin the papers. Good luck to yu sir, an I hope your head goes back down to normal size and has a chance to cool off.

http://www.ronsuskind.com/thewayoftheworld/tran…

Rob: It probably passed through five or six people. George probably showed it to me, but then passed it probably to Jim Pavitt, the DDO, who then passed it down to his chief of staff who passed it to me. Cause that's how–you know, so I saw the original. I got a copy of it. But it was, there probably was–

I would personally expect much more supporting evidence than I have seen so far. I hope Suskind and Giraldi both have their sources on tape. I hope they both have some documentary evidence.

Also, if true, actual individuals were involved. Those actual individuals should receive the actual blame.

Let’s rely on some common sense. First to Suskind’s story, how stupid would the evil geniuses of the Bush administration, the ones who successfully fooled every intelligence agency in the world into believing Saddam had WMD, be to hand Tenent an order to forge documents on White House stationary?

This supposedly occurred after the Plame matter, while the rogue factions of the CIA were actively leaking every possible harmful story to the New York Times.

Right.

The American Conservative “source” conveniently blames Dick Cheney and Doug Feith, the two favorite arch-villians that would insure the most media play. If the Bush administration was prone to dishonesty, why wouldn’t they just place some WMD or a few hundred kilos of weapons grade plutonium in Iraq and let some NBC correspondent “discover” it through a hot tip? If this was done during the same time frame as this supposed forgery, the people of San Francisco would be building statues of Bush and Cheney posed to protect their beloved city.

It never ceases to amaze me what some people will believe.