Saint Patrick's day Patrick Fitz-,-gives George Bush sleepless nights

[rodeodance]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1707291,00.html
Saint Patrick's day

He is the relentless scourge of mobsters, terrorists, corrupt city bosses and even the White House. Paul Harris profiles Patrick Fitzgerald, the tenacious workaholic special prosecutor, who gives George Bush sleepless nights, and who has now turned his sights on the former Telegraph tycoon Conrad Black

Sunday February 12, 2006
The Observer

On fine days, when the icy blasts that give Chicago its Windy City nickname are not too strong, a lone figure sometimes exits a plush downtown house. The man, tall but unstriking, jogs a short distance to the shore of Lake Michigan. There, he runs a narrow path between the deep blue of the lake and Chicago's jagged-toothed skyline.

Few Chicagoans would recognise Patrick Fitzgerald on his jogs. The same cannot be said of some of the most powerful, the most violent and the most deadly people in the world. To them, he is clearly a dangerous man. For Fitzgerald has carved out a career in American law enforcement that has earned him the nickname 'The Untouchable', after the legendary Chicago lawman Eliot Ness. It is a good comparison - like Ness, Fitzgerald is ruthless and unrelenting. But unlike Ness, who put Al Capone behind bars, Fitzgerald's enemies go far beyond Chicago gangsters. They stretch from the caves of Afghanistan to the corridors of the White House. They include the Gambino mob family; the blind sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who masterminded the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993; Osama bin Laden, and a generation of Chicago politicians, bloated on a culture of corruption that Fitzgerald is seeking to eradicate.

Now, they also include the Bush administration, for Fitzgerald is the man investigating 'Plamegate'. In his hands an obscure investigation into the public unmasking of CIA agent Valerie Plame has become the most far-reaching political scandal since Whitewater, perhaps even Watergate. It was the ticking time bomb under George W Bush that blew up last October, when top White House official Lewis 'Scooter' Libby was indicted on perjury charges.

[Liberty Belle]

1. Great piece. Thanks for posting.

:kick:

Merry Fitzmas!

[freeplessinseattle]

2. oh, Fitz is my man...and this is eerie:

He had switched from international terrorism to political corruption. One of his last emails for his old New York job was to a colleague who was also leaving the terror field. 'You can't leave, they're going to hit us again and someone has got to be around to work it,' he wrote. The email was dated 10 September 2001.

[MarinCoUSA]

3. But its still Bush 2, Fitz 0 In the Political Spin Game

With the announcement that Libby's trial date will be after the '06 election, Rove has secured another strategic victory for Chimpy- keeping this story directly OUT of the election news. The first being, of course, keeping it out of the '04 presidential election cycle.

And as much as I'd like to see Rove do the frog walk, I suspect that the Bush family tradition of pardoning your political cronies the Xmas eve of your departure from office will endure to make that score 3-0.