31 October 2005

Mr. Libby's story was not true

Vice president Dick Cheney's chief of staff lied under oath and repeatedly, according to an indictment handed down Friday from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

On the surface, while it's sad news to see the first White House official in over 130 years indicted, it could have been a lot worse for the Bush administration, as Bush's Brain, Karl Rove, escaped an indictment for the present time. According to Rove's lawyer, he is still in legal jeopardy, and may have eluded the wrath of the grand jury by some eleventh hour finagling. However, the investigation remains open, though Mr. Fitzgerald did say that the "substantial" portion of the investigation is concluded. He was tight lipped about any other future developments, other than trial preparation for Mr. Libby.

OK, is the investigation finished? It's not over, but I'll tell you this: Very rarely do you bring a charge in a case that's going to be tried and would you ever end a grand jury investigation.

I can tell you, the substantial bulk of the work in this investigation is concluded.

Will I. Lewis Libby serve the kamikazi role, and go the same prison route as traversed by G. Gordon Liddy during the Watergate era? Or will he sing to Mr. Fitzgerald, and shake some more skeletons out of the White House, including his boss Dick Cheney?

Republican loyalists are sneering at the indictment, terming it a perjury technicality akin to the recent Martha Stewart prosecution for a crime that wasn't even committed . Some even enter the theater of the absurd, crying that Fitzgerald is a Democratic partisan. Personally, I find that to be puzzling, given the venom directed at President Clinton for his perjury over an affair with an intern, that had no relevance to his duties, and while the immorality of infidelity casted a cloud over his character, those in Congress pushing the charge were all guilty themselves of the same illicit behavior as are many individuals perched atop the power pinnacle in America. A far cry from perjury in the act of thwarting an investigation over leaking an CIA agent's identity that jeopardized national security.

PlameGate, or WilsonGate, or LibbyGate, or NigerGate or whatever its final moniker will be has been dragged out two years, and yet, more questions have arisen than answers revealed.

  • Why was Scooter Libby lying and twisting his story again and again? Yes, his defense will be a failing memory, but even reporters at the Fitzgerald press conference broke out in laughter after Fitzgerald reported all the obvious conflicting testimony?

  • Why was Joseph Wilson marked as a target if the Bush adminstration truly thought their intel on Iraq and WMD was accurate?

  • Is this all going to play out like a he said/she said circle jerk and Karl Rove chuckling gleefully in C. Montgomery Burns fashion at the conclusion?

  • Is Judy Miller nothing more than a neoconservative tool?

  • Will more details emerge or will the true story be buried until some future date where an enterprising investigative journalist digs it out.

Still, it is apparent that the Wilsons were targeted by Bush adminstration officials in a behind the curtain struggle between powerful entities. That happened to include fraudulent justification of an invasion of a country that posed no threat to the United States based on false and manufactured pretense. It sure looks to me like anyone that wanted to blow the whistle on the hawkish neoconservative clan would be caught in the crosshairs and dealt damage, even if it meant on a personal level, or to the destruction of the very apparatus that serves to protect the nation. Why was there a drive to impeach a president over perjury regarding marital infidelity, but not for a president whose White House has run amok, discarding the truth to fit an already predetermined policy?

One final note — there seems to be great jubilation in Democrat/Progressive enclaves for "Merry Fitzmas", but count me out of that party. As much as I detest the Bush presidency, these developments dishearten me. I wish for justice to be done, but I am not delighted what so ever that senior officials in the executive branch of our government acted in such a fashion. It's not a cause for celebration, it's a time to root out the corruption and replace the scoundrels with statesmen, displace dishonesty with honesty, and get America back on track.

Some other perspectives from around the internets:

  • Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has his own website, where all the pertinent court documents are being posted.

  • Larry Johnson addresses the far right talking points on Joseph Wilson and their grasping at straws and clutching with copies of the total abomination that was the Senate Intelligence Committee report from July 2004. Here's an accompaning article that throws water on the claim about British intelligence on Niger.

  • Libby's lawyers prepare a CRS defense.

  • Joseph Wilson says the president owes the nation both an explanation and an apology.

  • The first Jacobin falls.
    The Bush administration neoconservatives who assembled the "intelligence" knew that it was false. The neoconservatives had their own agenda. They used the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to turn the Bush administration to their agenda. As the leaked top secret British government Downing Street memo made clear, the agenda was to invade Iraq, and "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

    There was a conspiracy among neoconservatives holding high positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, the vice president's office and the National Security Council. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, described the conspirators as "a secretive, little-known cabal … made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld." Wilkerson says that the secret workings of this furtive cabal took foreign policy and decisions about war out of the normal government channels.

  • President Bush rediscovers the presumption of innocence.

  • Air America radio network founder Sheldon Drobny believes Fitzgerald tossed a softball.
    Fitzgerald had to indict Libby. Libby's lies were so blatant that Fitzgerald had no choice. But Fitzgerald had a golden opportunity to do enough work to prove the underlying crimes that he was originally investigating. Those crimes involve two offenses in the U.S. Criminal Code; Conspiracy and Outing a CIA agent. Essentially Fitzgerald indicted Libby for preventing his prosecutors from proving the underlying crimes he was investigating by using a baseball metaphor in that Libby "threw sand in the umpires eyes." That part is patently absurd.

    In most conspiracy cases, one or more of the co-conspirators invariably lie to the FBI or the Grand Jury. That is something that prosecutors face all the time. The idea that Libby alone prevented Fitzgerald from proving the underlying crime is absurd. If Cheney told Libby about Valerie Plame, there obviously was a reason. The idea that Cheney, Libby, Rove and Bush did not talk to each other about the purpose of passing on this information to the press is simply not believable. And there were many ways that Fitzgerald could have proven the conspiracy in spite of Libby's lies. The fact that Libby lied would normally embolden a prosecutor to prove the underlying crime. This was not the case for Fitzgerald.

  • Laura Rozen covers the Niger forgeries and Italian involvement:
    The new information is that Nicolo Pollari, head of Italian military intelligence (SISMI), met with deputy director of the national security council, Stephen Hadley. SISMI circles, with their American acolytes on the right, are suspected of having a hand in the creation and distribution of the forgeries alleging Iraqi purchases of Niger yellowcake uranium. Such a meeting is unusual, since foreign officials usually meet their own peers. So Pollari should have been meeting with the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, not with a high national security council staffer. If Hadley gathered intelligence from Pollari, I suspect it may even have been illicit. (See below*).

    This meeting could be important, because as I remember the story, Hadley authorized the claims in Bush's State of the Union address about Iraqi purchases of African uranium. Bush kept wanting to put the claim in, and the CIA kept making him take it back out, as the Washington Post reported in 2003. When the CIA wouldn't sign off on the Niger uranium claims, someone in Rice's national security council staff (I remember it as Hadley) suggested that it be sourced instead to "British intelligence." But I suspect "British intelligence" is actually a euphemism for "Italian military intelligence." Anyway, Tenet was forced to go along with the change as long as the CIA did not have to certify it was correct. He later apologized even for that much of a lapse. But of course Hadley should have been made to resign.

  • The New York Times still won't answer whether reporter Judy Miller, jailed for contempt during the Fitzgerald investigation, had a special security clearance, as claimed in her October 16 pseudo-mea-culpa. The paper's public editor attempted to discover the answer too, but was unable to obtain an answer either.


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