White House & Downing Street cosponsored fish fry

And the fish keep getting bigger.

Less than one week after Dana Priest’s bombshell column in the Washington Post, Senate Republicans are now launching their own probe into what may be yet *another* big-time CIA-related leak originated from one of their own.

“We can’t keep our mouths shut,” admitted Trent Lott, shown here implicating his own men today on CNN.

Dennis Hastert and Bill Frist also raised the red flag in fear that if these leaks go unquelled, they will in fact worsen.

Things are equally shaky for PM Tony Blair on the other side of the pond. Sir Christopher Meyer, the UK Ambassador to Washington at the time the Iraq war began just released a book accusing Blair of being seduced by the power of the U.S. and not taking advantage of the UK’s status as a key ally in negotiating conditions for war.

“Had Britain so insisted,” writes Meyer in ‘DC Confidential, serialized on Monday in The Guardian,’ “Iraq and Saddam might have avoided the violence that may yet prove fatal to the entire enterprise.

Last week a coalition of Labor and Tory members of Britain’s Parliament began an aggressive push for their own investigation into “the conduct of ministers” both before and after the war, according to the Sunday Times.

Unlike the United States, Britain is a signatory to the treaty that set up the International Criminal Court, modeled after the Geneva Conventions and the 1945 Nuremberg Charter. While the U.S. government assumes their refusal to recognize the courts will nullify them from being brought to trial, Downing Street is more than a bit testy over present matters.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has already told the BBC that the US-led invasion was “an illegal act that contravened the UN charter,” and the Nuremberg Charter itself proclaimed in bold letters: “To initiate a war of aggression… is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Ironically, it is on this exact premise that Saddam Hussein is set to be tried in Iraq.

Finally, when President Bush declared this morning that “we do not torture,” did anyone else have an image of Nixon flash before their eyes demanding, “I am NOT a liar?!?”

As a postscript, here is Time Magazine’s interview of the second of Hussein’s attorneys to be slain, Adil al-Zubeidi, which took place the day before he died.

PPS: A Pew Poll released today shows that 4 out of 5 surveyed consider Scooter Libby’s obstruction of justice to be very important to the country….