Is Mary Mapes Headed "Up The River"?

Mary Mapes, Dan Rather’s 60 Minutes II producer, could be in some deep, deep federal criminal doo-doo, according to a story that broke today. Joe Flint of the Wall Street Journal (as made available to non-subscribers in today’s San Francisco Chronicle), reports the following:

After she uncovered photos of abuse at Iraq's Abu Gharib [sic] prison, 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes told a newspaper interviewer that she'd ‘never had a story that reverberated like this.’

Says Douglas Hanson of americanthinker.com,

“Mapes didn’t ‘uncover’ anything. My article in The American Thinker on May 14, 2004 makes it clear that the incriminating photos of prisoner abuse and the reports of the Army’s multiple investigations were extremely sensitive in two ways: one, they were classified as Secret, and two, the documents were evidence in an ongoing criminal investigation of US soldiers. As I noted in the article,

“Whoever disclosed this classified document and the photos knows that he or she is subject to prosecution under provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ)…” [my emphasis]

Concludes Mr. Hanson, “Mary Mapes and CBS may now find themselves the targets of an FBI investigation with serious national security and criminal implications.”

And just think – I hear tell that after John Kerry goes down in flames on November 2nd, the Democrats next “get-Bush” gambit is to be an attempted impeachment based upon…Abu Ghraib. On which, BTW, the Bush White House and Pentagon brass have been cleared of any wrongdoing.

This is probably a dumb question, but I can’t help wondering if the time will come, not too long from now, when most Democrats will finally hit rock bottom and admit that Bushophobia is a metastasizing cancer on their party and must be excised before it completely destroys them as a competitive national political entity.

Here are a couple of hints.