Politics as usual? Or just Treason?
So, tonight I sit here wondering if there is any true justice, and any way to find middle ground on this one. “Scooter” Libby, an inner member of the Bush team, lies to a Grand Jury. He is prosecuted by a Bush appointee, found guilty by a jury, sentenced by a Bush appointee, and the implementation of his conviction is upheld by an Appeals Court in a 3-0 decision; two of those three judges are also Bush appointees. Yet the President says that the sentence, given in accordance with federal sentencing guidelines, is “excessive.” So Bush commutes the sentence and gives his friend a “Get Out Of Jail” card. In the meantime, the commutation keeps the appeal alive and therefore allows Bush and Cheney to “not comment on a current case.”
Never mind that Bush said “If there’s a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is . . . If the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of.”
Never mind that not just Ms. Plame’s career, but the lives of other operatives have been put in play as foreign intelligence services walk back over her tracks to see with whom she spoke and where she went. Certainly Bush 41 thought this was a problem when he said:
“I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”
Never mind that this stems from an apparent attack on a career diplomat who asked for accountability in the build-up to war in Iraq by demanding that the American people be told the truth, rather than being scared into support of a decision to commit US troops and resources in a second war.
I actually understand trying to cover up misbehavior.
I understand that someone might try obfuscation and lies to protect themselves.
I understand trying to shield others by “taking one for the team.”
But where is the supposed moral leadership, the honesty and integrity, the responsibility for one’s actions?
Isn’t this just more quid pro quo? And isn’t the action of revealing a covert agent’s name still a felony and treasonous?
So what are we saying here about the accountability of those in power? The message seems to be that there is no “Truth” if you are contradicting this administration, and no “Wrong” if you are supporting them.
What is bravery now?
Nick
July 4th, 2007 12:20
Hi Nick-
I find it ironic that I’m reading this on the Fourth of July.
I’m going to make this short, addressing the Administration’s own argument for commuting the sentence: it’s excessive.
This is where I see hypocrisy. The claim is that the sentence supercedes the norm for this particular crime, so Bush has to make things fair.
The Administration is interested in sentences being equal for apparently equal crimes? So…how many other sentences has Bush commuted that were excessive? Not those of any Administration officials, but the general public? I did a quick net search and couldn’t find anything recent. I assume it would be big news. Anyone know of any such cases?
If all men are created equal…some are clearly considered more equal than others.
Susan
July 6th, 2007 08:45
Susan you are forgetting the divine plan. This is all about the big picture, this is not for members of the public to question the action of our estemed leaders. Just as you can’t expect all the members of the public to understand the benifits of certain unmentionalble biological processes that could offer great cures.
Nick really those at the top are the ones who enforce the rules, if they applied them to themselves who would govern us? Remember in days gone by if a peasant spoke against the king, that was treason. If the king spoke against the peasant it was the peasants fault for being a peasant.
I read a beautiful and much more eloqent passage in a book called Thinking to some purpose by L Susan Stebbing. A rather long quote by Archdeacon Paley in the eighteenth century. It explains effectivly why the poor are so lucky as they experience fatigue, so when they take rest it can be enjoyed, but the rich who do not experience fatigue cannot find the same enjoyment in being free from the neccessity of work at all. This is not an exact quote, but you get the idea that we can only see things from our side if we were in Bush’s shoes we might not understand why the peasants do not comprehend why we do what we do and why it makes sense to us.
You might not like what other people do, you might think what they do is wrong, but you must first try to understand their reasoning even if it seems flawed. For example I often debate with religious people, I have read the bible, and studied religious education. Unfortunatly I find when they opose scientific thinking, they have not often studied it.
July 28th, 2007 19:05
Mr Fitzgerald, the Special Prosecutor, apparently knew early in the investigation that the Richard Armitage revealed that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent to the columnist, Mr Novack.
Neither Mr Armitage nor Mr Novack were charged. Apperently there is a strict legal definition of the crime of revrealing a covert agent. Apparently neither of these men broke this law for they were neither investigated nor charged.
Since Mr Fitzgerald continued the investigation despite having found those materially responsible, one has to question what his purpose was. He had the “bad guys” already.
One reasonable interpretation of his actions was a political hunting expedition. One can also see that with the unlimited resources allowed to a Special Prosecutor, it can be relatively easy to target individuals repeatedly until they run afoul of a determined and relentless investigator.
Without wishing to defend the act of lying under oath, one can see the hazard of allowing prosecutors extraordinary leeway to pursue individuals when there has been no original crime committed.
It is obvious this has been a political investigation when it should have been a criminal one.
Under these circumstances Mr Libby and others in the administration have been picked for their association with Mr Bush and his policies.
This argument leaves aside entirely the the difficulties and unreliability of Mr Wilson and Ms Plame’s statements, which have been substantially refuted or shown to be falsehoods.
Sincerely,
Denis Hogan
August 9th, 2007 00:43
Susan- I did a check, and found this info in a NYTimes article:
“In the six years that George W. Bush was governor of Texas, a state that executes more people than any other, he commuted a single death sentence and allowed 152 executions to go forward. He also pardoned 20 people charged with lesser crimes, said Maria Ramirez, the state’s clemency administrator. That was fewer than any Texas governor since the 1940s.
As president, Mr. Bush has commuted three sentences in addition to Mr. Libby’s and denied more than 4,000 requests, said Margaret Colgate Love, the pardon lawyer at the Justice Department for most of the 1990s. He has also issued 113 pardons and denied more than 1,000 requests. “His grant rate is very low compared to other presidents’,” she said.” So draw whatever conclusions you can from that…
Denis-
yes, the special prosecutor, Mr Fitzgerald did know that Mr Armitage was a source of the information. He also knew that there was more to the story, which could be another reasonable reason for his continued investigation.
You did leave out the name of the other source, the one who confirmed the initial leak for Novak’s column: that second source was Mr. Karl Rove. Also, Mr. Novak has been clear thet he did not seek out the information; rather he was called in by Deputy Sec. of State Armitage (and a friend of Mr. Rove). This is the same Mr. Rove who, in 1980, was fired from George H. W. Bush’s vice-presidential campaign after leaking information to …. (wait for it…….) journalist Robert Novak.
In July 2003, just days after publishing the column blowing Plame’s cover, Novak told Newsday reporters that he was doing the Bush administration’s bidding when he divulged Plame’s CIA identity. “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me,” Novak said. “They thought it was significant, they gave me the name” [Newsday, July 22, 2003] referring to Armitage and Rove.
This was not the Bush Administration’s only attempt to get this information into the public sphere:
On June 23, 2003, Libby briefed New York Times reporter Judith Miller about Wilson and may have passed on the tip about Wilson’s wife working at the CIA at that time
On July 6, ex-ambassador Wilson published “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” in the NY Times. In the Op-Ed, he charged that the White House had “twisted” intelligence to invade Iraq. The documents which the US and British intelligence used refuting Mr. Wilson which showed proof of uranium buys were later shown to be forgeries by El Baradai at the IAEA. I don’t recall that the act of forgery was traced to any specific agent or agency. (Interestingly, Mr. Rove has been associated with forgery in the cause of political gain. In 1970, Rove was found to have snuck into the office of Illinois Democratic Senator Alan Dixon and stole some of his letterhead. Rove then created a number of fliers promising “free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing,” and distributed them at rock concerts and homeless shelters. Cute.)
“However, in 2005, Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA and the intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, expressed the opinion that the documents had been produced in the United States and funneled through the Italians: “The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein…” (source: alternet.com)
Anyway, back to the timeline: the next day, July 7, Libby took White House press secretary Ari Fleischer to lunch. (There is, according to my reading, apparently no precedent for this: in WH pecking order , this was like the Jr. VP having lunch with the Senior Secretary.) Libby told Fleischer that Wilson’s wife worked in the CIA’s counter-proliferation division which had sent Wilson on his mission to Africa. Over the next two days (Fleischer later testified) he briefed at least two reporters about Plame’s identity.
On July 8, Mr. Libby told Judith Miller of the Times that Wilson’s wife worked at a CIA unit responsible for weapons intelligence and non-proliferation.
On July 20, 2003, NBC’s correspondent Andrea Mitchell told Wilson that “senior White House sources” had called her to stress “the real story here” was “Wilson and his wife.” The next day, Wilson was told by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that “I just got off the phone with Karl Rove. He says and I quote, ‘Wilson’s wife is fair game.’” (Source for the foregoing timeline-Consortiumnews.com)
Given this information, I don’t see the hazard in appointing a special prosecutor, nor do I see that the investigation was obviously politically inspired. The possibility exists here that someone tried to do his job and found out that people in the government were lying. Perhaps he saw his job as not just getting the folks who said what they shouldn’t, but also to get at the folks who were behind what was, by the evidence we can see, a fairly well-organized campaign from within the administration, involving the VP’s staff, the State Dept, the Communications Office and the president’s chief political advisor, as well as “forgers unknown”.
Why, exactly, only Libby was charged, is unknown. Mr Fitzgerald has declined to comment on a number of aspects of the case, and I wish that were not so. But to focus only on the possible political motivations of an investigation rather on the obvious misbehavior and questionable motivations of these senior officials confuses me.
Nick
August 13th, 2007 21:21
OOps. The earlier Rove-Novak collaboration was in 1992, not 1980. Sorry for the error.
Nick