On Mar 10, 4:51=EF=BF=BDpm, B J Foster wrote:
> 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:
>
> > =A0 =A0In 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.
>
> > =A0 =A0The 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:
>
> > =A0 =A0When 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:
>
> > =A0 =A0Rather 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"- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Perverse Libby trial was revealing
(http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/291111,CST-EDT-steyn11.article)
March 11, 2007
BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist
A couple of days ago, Shane Gibson, the Bahamian immigration minister,
resigned. The Tribune in Nassau had published front-page pictures of
him in bed with Anna Nicole Smith. Could happen to anyone. Riding high
in February, shot down in March. And, in fairness to the minister,
both parties were fully clothed. Indeed, Anna Nicole was more fully
clothed than she usually was out of bed.
My point here is that this is a classic scandal in the Westminster
parliamentary tradition: On Monday, you're blandly denying vague
rumors; on Tuesday, they're all over the front page; on Wednesday,
you're photographed alongside your long-suffering wife vowing to fight
this outrageous slur; on Thursday, you're resigning to spend more time
with your family and the prime minister issues a statement saying the
nation will always be grateful to you for your long years of public
service culminating in the passage of the Municipal Airports (Parking
Lot Signage) Bill, and on Friday your successor is seated behind your
desk already working on his own career-detonating scandal.
Washington doesn't seem to do things that way. In a Beltway political
scandal, you appoint a special prosecutor who investigates it for
years and the scandal metastasizes and morphs in bizarre fantastic
ways. I'm not being especially partisan here. I thought Bill Clinton
should have resigned when the blue dress showed up. But the months
pass and instead he's testifying to the grand jury about his
definition of non-.ual relations -- if the party of the first part
is apart from the parts of the party of the second part while the
party of the second part is partaking of the parts of the party of the
first part, etc. -- and once you're arguing on that basis the very
process is a mockery.
What's just happened to Scooter Libby is, I think, worse. In his
closing remarks, Patrick Fitzgerald invited the jury to view a narrow
perjury case as something epic: ''What is this case about?'' the
special counsel mused. ''Is it about something bigger?'' Fortunately,
he was musing rhetorically, and he had the answer on hand: ''There is
a cloud over the vice president. . . . There is a cloud over the White
House.''
Indeed. And what exactly is the cloud? Is it that the name of a covert
agent was intentionally leaked in breach of the relevant law on non-
disclosure?
No. On the alleged violation of Valerie Plame's identity, Fitzgerald
was unable to produce not only a perpetrator but any crime.
Is the cloud then a more general murk? A politically motivated attempt
to damage the white knight Joe Wilson as he sallied forth against the
Bush dragon?
No. The man who leaked Valerie Plame's name was Richard Armitage,
Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department and a man who dislikes
Rove, Cheney and all their neocon warmongering works. The journalist
he leaked it to -- Bob Novak -- was also opposed to the Iraq war.
Neither Armitage nor Novak had any animus against Joe Wilson. On the
contrary, they broadly share Wilson's skepticism on the threat posed
by Saddam. There was no conspiracy, just Armitage gossiping like the
gravelly voiced schoolgirl he's been for years.
When a prosecutor speaks about ''a cloud over the vice president's
office'' and ''a cloud over the White House,'' he is speaking
politically. There is no law about the amount of cumulus permitted
over 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The prosecutor is speculating on
political capital -- reputation, credibility, the currency of
politics. Once damaged, they're hard to recover. So, even if it's not
within the purview of the jury, his question is relevant to the wider
world: How did this cloud get there and stay there even though it had
no meaningful rainfall?
Answer: Patrick Fitzgerald.
The prosecutor knew from the beginning that (a) leaking Valerie
Plame's name was not a crime and (b) the guy who did it was Richard
Armitage. In other words, he was aware that the public and media
perception of this ''case'' was entirely wrong: There was no
conspiracy by Bush ideologues to damage a whistleblower, only an anti-
war official making an offhand remark to an anti-war reporter. Even
the usual appeals to prosecutorial discretion (Libby was a peripheral
figure with only he said/she said evidence in an investigation with no
underlying crime) don't convey the scale of Fitzgerald's perversity:
He knew, in fact, that there was no cloud, that under all the dark
scudding about Rove and Cheney there was only sunny Richard Armitage
blabbing away accidentally. Yet he chose to let the entirely false
impression of his ''case'' sit out there month in, month out, year
after year, glowering over the White House, doing great damage to the
presidency on the critical issue of the day.
So much of the current degraded discourse on the war -- ''Bush lied''
-- comes from the false perceptions of the Joe Wilson Niger story.
Britain's MI-6, the French, the Italians and most other functioning
intelligence services believe Saddam was trying to procure uranium
from Africa. Lord Butler's special investigation supports it. So does
the Senate Intelligence Committee. So Wilson's original charge is if
not false then at the very least unproven, and the conspiracy arising
therefrom entirely nonexistent. But the damage inflicted by the cloud
is real and lasting.
As for Scooter Libby, he faces up to 25 years in jail for the crime of
failing to remember when he first heard the name of Valerie Plame --
whether by accident or intent no one can ever say for sure. But we
also know that Joe Wilson failed to remember that his original
briefing to the CIA after getting back from Niger was significantly
different from the way he characterized it in his op-ed in the New
York Times. We do know that the contemptible Armitage failed to come
forward and clear the air as his colleagues were smeared for months on
end. We do know that his boss Colin Powell sat by as the very
character of the administration was corroded.
And we know that Patrick Fitzgerald knew all this and more as he
frittered away the years, and the ''political blood lust'' (as
National Review's Rich Lowry calls it) grew ever more disconnected
from humdrum reality. The cloud over the White House is Fitzgerald's,
and his closing remarks to the jury were highly revealing. If he
dislikes Bush and Cheney and the Iraq war, whoopee: Run against them,
or donate to the Democrats, or get a talk-radio show. Instead, he
chose in full knowledge of the truth to maintain artificially a three-
year cloud over the White House while the anti-Bush left frantically
mistook its salivating for the first drops of a downpour. The result
is the disgrace of Scooter Libby. Big deal. Patrick Fitzgerald's
disgrace is the greater, and a huge victory not for justice or the law
but for the criminalization of politics.
=EF=BF=BD Mark Steyn 2007
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