US: With US troops unable to find expected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a group of officials met aboard Air Force Two in mid-2003 to discuss how to respond to the growing prominence of one particular critic of President Bush's Iraq policy. Vice-President Dick Cheney was on the flight. So was his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
It was a scene that suggested intrigue. And if it had occurred as part of a past Washington scandal, the investigator who revealed it would likely have included a wealth of details, naming everyone present and laying out what they said.
But when special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced last Friday that he was wrapping up his two-year investigation of the CIA leak case, he offered only the barest sketch of the meeting on Air Force Two - and left many central questions in the case unanswered. Did Cheney help map out strategy with Libby during the flight? Did officials talk about the wife of the Bush critic, Valerie Plame, and that she worked for the CIA - a detail that soon leaked to the press? Was Cheney even at the meeting, or did he sit elsewhere on the plane?
Answering none of those questions, Fitzgerald's 22-page indictment, with its bare-bones outlines of the case, provided a bracing lesson on what major political investigations have become now that they are no longer conducted by independent counsels, and how the culture of rooting out scandal in Washington has fundamentally changed. Ever since Watergate, special federal investigations of political scandals have often ended with detailed accounts of the inner workings of government.
The probes might take years; they might cost millions; but at the end, they often provided a rich, detailed story of the episode in question. The reason was the independent counsel law, created by Congress in 1978 because it felt the executive branch could not be trusted to investigate itself in cases of alleged abuse and corruption. Independent counsels gave the nation book-length - even multi-volume - examinations of the Iran-Contra affair and of president Clinton's relations with a former intern. But Congress in 1999 chose not to renew the law authorising them, out of concern that they were being used to pursue partisan witch-hunts.
Fitzgerald, by contrast, is a special prosecutor, charged with bringing violations of the law to court, rather than information to the court of public opinion. His spare account suggests that with the independent counsel statute gone, the public is apt to know far less about the actions of elected officials and government bureaucrats when they are engaged in questionable conduct that does not violate the law.
"My job is to investigate whether or not a crime was committed, can be proved and should be charged," Fitzgerald said as he announced an indictment of Libby for allegedly lying to the FBI and a grand jury investigating the leak case. "I'm not going to comment on what to make beyond that. It's not my jurisdiction, not my job, not my judgment." Because only Libby was charged, he said, he would not be answering many questions about the actions of other officials.
Some legal experts see the new practice as a good development, restoring a proper restraint as investigators ferret out information about wrongdoing. Prosecutors should focus strictly on bringing and proving charges in court; watchdogs such as Congress and the press can use their own powers to sort out lapses in judgment by policymakers, this thinking goes.
"There is a trade-off. The public does not automatically get the fruits of the good information that a criminal investigation does gather," said John Barrett, a professor at St John's University law school in New York and a former associate independent counsel. At the same time, he said, it can be unfair to people who are investigated but never charged to have their names publicly exposed.
Some people said that by releasing a tightly focused indictment of Libby, Fitzgerald had shown that the nation is better off than when independent counsels such as Kenneth Starr investigated politicians. Starr's investigation of Clinton yielded a 445-page account that included substantial information about the president's sexual relations with former intern Monica Lewinsky.
Where Fitzgerald released only information that supported the charges in the indictment, Starr's voluminous account led to accusations that he had gratuitously invaded the private life of the president and the first family, and that he had veered far from his original mission of investigating the Whitewater land deal.
"Mr Fitzgerald has proven that we are all better off without an independent counsel law," said Lanny Davis, a lawyer and Clinton adviser during the Lewinsky affair. But others said that system can also deprive the public of crucial information, and that prosecutors can sometimes view their role too narrowly.
The indictment against Libby alleges that he talked to reporters about Plame and her CIA affiliation. Critics of the Bush administration have said this was meant to undercut Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson IV, who was gaining attention for saying that the Bush administration had bolstered its case for invading Iraq by exaggerating Saddam Hussein's interest in acquiring nuclear materials.
But left unclear in the indictment, several people noted, is whether Libby talked to reporters on his own impetus, or whether he was responding to pressures from more senior officials. "The question is, is this a White House that is creating an environment of vengeance and punishment against people who disagree with them, or is this just an example of one guy who went too far?" asked Kenneth Parsigian, a Boston lawyer who was an associate to independent counsel Lawrence Walsh during the Iran-Contra affair inquiry. "Without a report, that may never be known."