"It" that shall not be named.... er... asked

This will be my one and only post on the Scooter Libby trial. Why? Because the below Byron York excerpt in "What the CIA Leak Case Is About" today says it all.

snip

From the first day, Walton has said that jurors will not be allowed to know, or even ask, about the status -- covert, classified or otherwise -- of Valerie Plame Wilson, the woman at the heart of the CIA leak case. "You must not consider these matters in your deliberations or speculate or guess about them," he told jurors in his opening instructions.

A few days later, on Jan. 29, Walton told everyone in the courtroom that the jurors are not the only ones in the dark about Mrs. Wilson's status. "I don't know, based on what has been presented to me in this case, what her status was," Walton said. Two days later, he added, "I to this day don't know what her actual status was."

Walton's reasoning is this: The trial is about whether Libby lied to the grand jury in the CIA leak investigation. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald never charged anyone with leaking the identity of a covert or classified agent. Libby isn't on trial for that, so jurors -- and judge -- don't need to know.

snip

A lengthy, expensive trial about what? What a waste of media bandwidth and docket expenses and time.

Yet Sandy Berger walks free, and no one cares what classified documents were stolen and destroyed. Nor does anyone care that we will *never* know. And that, folks, is the saddest state of affairs.