PJ O'Donovan wrote:
>Subscribe to email updates
>
>March 9, 2007
>The Libby travesty
>
>
Found that cartoon yet?
http://groups.google.com.au/group/aus.politics/msg/a777443863ac36d9
>"Many American commentators have expressed justifiable outrage over
>the perjury convictions of Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, the former aide to
>the US Vice President Dick Cheney. The details of this affair are as
>tortuous as they are arcane. The essence of the story was an apparent
>hunt by the special prosecutor to find the identity of a 'mole' who
>leaked the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, allegedly to
>discredit her husband Joseph C Wilson IV who had been dispatched to
>Niger to check whether Saddam had tried to buy uranium from that
>country, and who returned to say he had not done so and that the Bush
>administration had 'twisted' the facts in making the case for war
>against Iraq. The affair thus became a proxy for an attack upon the
>war in Iraq and for the claim that America was taken to war on a lie.
>
>But Libby was not source of the 'leak'. Strangely, the special
>prosecutor appears to have known from an early stage that the person
>who disclosed Ms Plame's name was Richard Armitage, a former State
>Department official and who, far from doing the bidding of the White
>House, was no friend of the administration's policy in Iraq. No action
>was ever taken against Armitage. Instead, Libby was hung out to dry
>for perjury. But the lies he appears to have told on oath concerned
>merely the identity of the person who had told him about Ms Plame. And
>the person who told the real whopper was none other than Joseph C
>Wilson IV himself. As the Washington Post reported:
>
> In conversations with journalists or in a July 6, 2003, op-ed, he
>[Wilson] claimed to have debunked evidence that Iraq was seeking
>uranium from Niger; suggested that he had been dispatched by Mr.
>Cheney to look into the matter; and alleged that his report had
>circulated at the highest levels of the administration. A bipartisan
>investigation by the Senate intelligence committee subsequently
>established that all of these claims were false - and that Mr. Wilson
>was recommended for the Niger trip by Ms. Plame, his wife. When this
>fact, along with Ms. Plame's name, was disclosed in a column by Robert
>D. Novak, Mr. Wilson advanced yet another sensational charge: that his
>wife was a covert CIA operative and that senior White House officials
>had orchestrated the leak of her name to destroy her career and thus
>punish Mr. Wilson.
>
> The partisan furor over this allegation led to the appointment of
>special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Yet after two years of
>investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald charged no one with a crime for leaking
>Ms. Plame's name. In fact, he learned early on that Mr. Novak's
>primary source was former deputy secretary of state Richard L.
>Armitage, an unlikely tool of the White House. The trial has provided
>convincing evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson
>by leaking Ms. Plame's identity - and no evidence that she was, in
>fact, covert. It would have been sensible for Mr. Fitzgerald to end
>his investigation after learning about Mr. Armitage. Instead, like
>many Washington special prosecutors before him, he pressed on,
>pursuing every tangent in the case.
>
>The anti-war crowd is using the Libby convictions to feed the 'Bush
>lied people died' line. But the fact is that, as Debra Saunders
>pointed out on RealClearPolitics, the fundamental issue was that all
>the evidence suggested that Saddam had indeed sought to buy uranium
>from Niger:
>
> When Joseph Wilson returned from Niger, officials who debriefed
>him thought that Wilson's information supported the belief that Iraq
>had sought uranium in Africa. As The Washington Post editorialized,
>'Wilson was the one guilty of twisting the truth' in saying he
>debunked the Niger story. The United Kingdom's Butler Commission also
>found the Niger story to be 'well-founded.'
>
>Indeed, British intelligence has maintained throughout that, from
>their own independent sources, they remain certain that Saddam was
>trying to buy uranium from Niger. As the Wall Street Journal furiously
>commented about the Bush administration's behaviour during this whole
>affair:
>
> Rather than confront Mr. Wilson's lies head on, they became
>defensive and allowed a trivial matter to become a threat to the
>Administration itself. They allowed Attorney General John Ashcroft to
>recuse himself and Mr. Fitzgerald to be appointed even though Justice
>officials knew that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had
>been the first official to leak Ms. Plame's name to reporters. Mr.
>Libby got caught in the eddy not because he was dishonest but because
>he was a rare official who actually had the temerity to defend the
>President's Iraq policy against Mr. Wilson's lies.
>
>The way the Bush administration mishandled this whole affair is surely
>a paradigm for its wider failure to get a grip and its apparent
>predilection for monumental own goals"
>
>
> |