http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070703_independence_day_for_libby
Independence Day for Libby
Jul 3, 2007
By Robert Scheer
Whatever happened to “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,”
which allows tough-love conservatives to cheerfully sentence petty
criminals to incarceration?
Suddenly, no prison time for perjury and obstruction of justice is
termed by this president to be a “harsh” penalty, because I. Lewis
“Scooter” Libby will suffer enough with his reputation “forever
damaged.”
Poor baby.
We will see just how damaged his reputation is as Libby comes to be
celebrated on the right-wing lecture circuit with fees that will
easily cover his wrist-slap of a fine.
Can agents with the promise of an Ollie-North-style talk show be far
behind?
Once again, we have an example of politicians championing the slogans
of law and order—until the criminal is one of their own, at which
point they suddenly become bleeding-heart liberals eager to ease the
pain of the misjudged underdog.
Blame the victim for Libby’s troubles; it was that outed CIA agent,
Valerie Plame, who made him do it.
Who told her to be married to a guy who dared to publicly criticize
Libby’s boss?
That’s the easiest explanation for President Bush’s commutation of the
Libby sentence, but there is an even more odious possible cause for
the president cutting loose his friend, the felon, hours after a
unanimous appeals court panel ordered Libby to start serving his
30-month sentence.
It’s that old chestnut of honor among thieves:
They didn’t want Libby to have any incentive to squeal on higher-ups.
Libby was never more than the fall guy whose usefulness to the
prosecutor was that he was a lower-level scoundrel in a position to
turn in his White House superiors.
The obstruction-of-justice and perjury charges of which Libby was
convicted do not involve some minor technicality or even a non-crime
as alleged by Mitt Romney:
“I believe that the circumstances of this case, where the prosecutors
knew that there had not been a crime committed, created a setting
where a decision of this nature [Bush’s decision] was reasonable.”
How odd that a leading Republican presidential candidate doesn’t
consider perjury and obstruction of justice to be crimes.
But what he probably had in mind was the original focus of the
investigation:
to determine if government officials had participated in the outing of
Plame as a means of discrediting her husband, former Ambassador Joseph
Wilson, who had dared to criticize Bush’s now totally discredited
reasons for invading Iraq.
Precisely because prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was stonewalled in his
investigation by Libby’s perjury and obstruction of justice, we have
no way of knowing whether that more serious crime was committed.
Romney and others who are apologizing for the administration are in
the position of accepting the word of a convicted perjurer as to the
intent of his conversations with reporters and his insistence that his
boss, Vice President ***** Cheney, was not involved in his shenanigans.
It is, however, inconceivable, from everything we have learned of
Cheney’s operating style, that his chief of staff ever did anything,
other than order lunch, without consulting with the vice president.
That certainly goes for the nefarious activities that got Libby in
trouble with the law in this instance.
We do know, from a solid body of published insider memoirs, that
Cheney was the key figure within the administration in pushing the
Iraq invasion, and that he remains determined to this day to deny that
there was any tampering with intelligence data in making his case for
war.
We also know that it was Cheney, more than anyone else in the White
House inner circle, who sought to counter criticism of the president,
and that he was outraged that Wilson had gone public with his
criticisms when Cheney and others in the administration continued to
knowingly disseminate false information.
That was the case concerning the bogus Niger yellow cake uranium
acquisition by Iraq which the CIA had dispatched Wilson to investigate
and which he, along with others, easily discounted.
Cheney certainly had a motive for wanting to destroy Wilson’s
credibility, which was the purpose of those leaked stories suggesting
that Wilson—who had previously been honored by President George H.W.
Bush for standing up to Saddam Hussein before the 1991 Gulf War—had
gone to Niger on a joyful junket, and that his subsequent critique of
the administration’s perfidy was politically motivated.
What was politically motivated was the outrageous behavior of the vice
president’s chief of staff in the denigration of a dedicated civil
servant and the president’s rewarding that convicted liar with a
commutation of sentence, effectively ending the pressure on Libby to
’fess up.
___________________________________________________
Harry
.
|
