zorba wrote:
>On Mar 10, 4:51�pm, 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:
>>>
>>>
>>>� �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"- 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.
>
>� Mark Steyn 2007
>
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