(2) US Attorney Patrick Fitzpatrick can't successfully prosecute him because national-security concerns prevent Libby's lawyers from getting CIA records they need to mount a defense, and this is required for a trial. A federal judge today ordered that Libby's lawyers be provided with summaries of Presidential Daily Briefs, but that will never happen. The CIA will object and Bush will cite "executive privilege."

Jean C. Edwards

Edwards, in her resume on the website of the Washington, D.C., law firm Akerman Senterfitt, says she worked for "Brewster-Jenning [sic] and Assoc." in Boston as an engineering consultant from 1985 to 1989.

One thing this means is that Brewster-Jennings is not a creature of the war on terror, which began after 9/11/2001.

Edwards' work experience before BJA was with a Miami company involved in "electrophysiology," including pulse monitoring of cardiac patients. Then she worked briefly with another Miami company that manufactures electronics for behavior control -- of dogs. The company makes devices that give a dog pleasing audio tones for positive reinforcement of desired behavior and negative tones otherwise.

To detect pilferage in uranium mines in a place like Niger, where pilferage has been suspected, one could envision the use of some kind of electronic animal-control or electrophysiology technology (like the ankle-worn tracking devices used to monitor prisoners under house arrest? a lie detector?). One could envision pulse-monitoring technology being used to make an enhanced Geiger counter to evaluate the number of warheads on a passing train. Or one could envision Edwards' jobs as being prosaic and unrelated to any kind of security.

Jean Edwards got her law license in 1995 and began working as an attorney in a Washington law office (not her current one) in 1996.

Currently working as a patent attorney, Edwards has a special interest in solid-state physics as it relates to lasers and fiberoptic cables.

Robert Ellmann

Then there is Robert Lawrence Ellmann, an attorney/economist/professor/filmmaker from Detroit who works in the Czech Republic for the law firm Jindrichovsky & Partners. His resume, also currently on the Internet, says he worked for "Brewster-Jennings & Associates, Boston, USA" in the period 1992-1996. Ellmann's resume says he did "contract administration" for Brewster-Jennings. His resume says he speaks Czech and basic Italian. It is even more eclectic than Edwards', looking more like the bibliography of a mystery-novel series than a resume.

Among his other activities in the Czech Republic, Ellmann is a noted maker of phantasmagorical documentary films (including one about a real-life mad scientist in Wisconsin who writes books calculated to make WMD a cottage industry  http://ellmannpraha.tripod.com/hnenglish.html ). Ellmann also is a lecturer in economics and banking. He apparently is the son of the famous US biographer of modern British and Irish writers, Richard Ellmann, who also was an OSS spy in World War II.

Surely if Brewster-Jennings was a US state secret, these highly intelligent people would not be outing it and themselves on the Internet, especially after all of the controversy about it.

So Brewster-Jennings was a publicly known company in Boston with employees who made and still make no effort to conceal their association with it. It utilized at least three professions -- economics, engineering and law -- and multifarious talents including lateral thinking. Also, it was started long before the war on terror.

BREWSTER-JENNINGS AND VALERIE PLAME

Brewster-Jennings took the international spotlight in practically every newspaper and news broadcast in the world when the news came out that columnist Robert Novak allegedly outed a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, and her CIA cover company, Brewster-Jennings Associates, in July 2003.

According to Jean Edwards' eclectic resume (including a degree in physics, and a degree in French with honors), Brewster-Jennings was in Boston 20 years ago. Yet no one has ever heard of it at its reported address, 101 Arch Street. This means either (a) the company was not at that address at all or for long or recently, or (b) it was, or is, at that address under another name.

Although this information has been erased from almost all databases, Brewster-Jennings once did share an address and phone number of the accounting firm Burke Dennehy in the same building. (The phone number is not the long-out-of-service number the media have given for Brewster-Jennings, 617-951-2529.) Burke Dennehy may have perfomed some kind of activity for Brewster-Jennings, maybe something simple like forwarding its mail and answering its phone. Maybe Brewster-Jennings was just a small, unimportant company that wanted a prestigious address.

The Burke Dennehy company once went by a longer name: Swampscott Burke Dennehy. "Swampscott," like "Brewster" in "Brewster-Jennings," is the name of a town in Massachusetts. There is no person to be found by that name. It is likely that "Brewster-Jennings" also stands for the name of a person AND a town, Brewster, MA.

It is also known that Burke Dennehy did business with a Mr. Jennings at a well known Anglo-Irish bank with offices in Boston. One of the things his department does is to set up trusts for expatriates. Burke Dennehy employed the accounting expertise of expatriates from Nepal, among other places, around 2001 and was listed by a group protesting jobs going to foreigners.

None of this is to say that Brewster-Jennings or Burke Dennehy ever was involved with national security.

I doubt the media claims that the company was named after Brewster Jennings, a long-ago president of Socony-Vacuum, the predecessor to Mobil, which of course is an oil company.

(Does anyone out there know anything about the CIA's nomenclature practices? I surely don't. All I know of sleuthing comes from the Nancy Drew books. Brewster-Jennings wasn't a CIA company, or not much of one.)


AN EXCLUSIVE ADDRESS

It's no wonder that Brewster-Jennings claimed to be based in the high-rise office building at 101 Arch St. in Boston. This adds a little class. The building is loaded with high-priced law firms and accountants as well as a smattering of technology companies.

Also, it is in the ZIP code 02110, and this has the most millionaires of any ZIP!

There's one thing Plame's alleged employer Brewster-Jennings does lack. No one has ever published a suite address for it. Mail addressed to this 21-story building without a suite number would be returned to the sender as undeliverable. It would, that is, unless the addressee was a well known tenant, and to this day no one in the building has acknowledged remembering Brewster-Jennings.

Libby may be guilty, in some sense, of perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice (as charged) in how he responded to investigators of an alleged Plame/Brewster-Jennings leak, but there shouldn't have been any leak investigation in the first place. The reason is that Plame and Brewster-Jennings were not undercover when Libby, Cheney, Rove, or whoever, told Robert Novak about them and when he wrote about them in July 2003. When the CIA allowed Edwards and Ellmann to publish their Brewster-Jennings affiliations and dates of employment on the Internet years before -- as discussed below -- Brewster-Jennings, and whatever it involved, came out of cover and into the public domain along with them. This was years before Novak wrote about Plame and her BJA operation.

Without a leak of covered, secret status there is no leak crime, should have been no leak investigation by a grand jury, and should be no conviction arising from the investigation.

Valerie Plame-Wilson listed "Brewster-Jennings Assoc." as her employer on a campaign-contribution form, which is how Novak tied it to her in the first place. Someone in the US government apparently already had told Novak that Plame was a CIA employee.

NEVER UNDERCOVER

Other persons besides Plame have not concealed their employment with Brewster-Jennings. Jean C. Edwards and Robert Lawrence (Laurence) Ellmann even advertise their former employment with the company on the Internet and did so before Novak supposedly outed Plame.


SUMMARY

Libby, Rove, Cheney, Novak and others did not damage US national security by what Novak and others published about Plame. There is no leak case against them because there was no leak. Brewster-Jennings, which Plame listed as her employer, was not a secret, at least not according to the two former employees cited here. Libby should not have been investigated for a nonexistent leak. If he hadn't been, he wouldn't be facing charges of perjury, false statements, and obstruction. There may be something rotten in Denmark, but what I smell in Boston is a red herring.