Libby’s sentence commuted
Posted July 2nd, 2007 at 7:15 PM by Jon HamCNN is, naturally, interviewing serial liar Joe Wilson regarding President Bush’s commuting of Scooter Libby’s perjury and obstruction of justice sentence. He just accused Libby of being a traitor for betraying his wife. Of course, Libby never did anything of the sort. It was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who did that, but Wilson seems to have forgotten that. Special Prosecutor-run-amok Patrick Fitzgerald wasted millions of dollars to find out who leaked Valerie Plame’s name, but he knew from the beginning that it wasn’t Karl Rove or Richard Cheney or Scooter Libby. He ended up getting Libby indicted and convicted for remembering conversations differently than some news reporters, calling that obstruction of justice. Plame and Armitage, who also gave conflicting stories about their roles, were never in danger of indictment.
Meanwhile, Sandy Berger, who stole and destroyed top secret, classified documents from the National Archives to save the Clinton Administration from embarrassment, lost his law license and got a stern talking to. That disparity surely played into the commutation of Libby’s 30-month jail sentence. I say good show, George.
UPDATE: Bill Schneider says this will be unpopular. Big surprise, coming from Bill. I’ve just remembered why I don’t watch CNN unless my daughter is on. Suzanne Malveaux, Schneider, Wilson, what a lineup. Schneider thinks the public will be angry about someone getting out of jail because of friends in high places. But he doesn’t factor in the anger over Fitzgerald’s Nifongian prosecutorial misconduct from the start, when he knew none of his targets had outed Valerie Plame.
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:26 pm
I am usually in close agreement with you on many issues, but not this time. Libby appears to have been the fall guy to spare the vice president and Rove further scrutiny for their acts of reprisal against Wilson for not supporting the rush to war in Iraq. Bush’s commutation of Libby’s 30 month sentence appears to be quid pro quo for shielding the V.P. and Rove. I agree, Sandy Berger acts of egregious misconduct warranted more than a slap on the wrist, but so what? One guy gets a pass so the other one is due? Should Nifong still be the DA because the Bar failed to disbar in the last two high-profile cases? Is that your rationale?
The fact that this administration did a hatchet job on anyone who spoke out against or even questioned the intelligence leading up to this fiasco in Iraq is deplorable. Those who speak truth to power served this nation well by calling into question the justification for war in Iraq. Sadly, to few in the halls of congress and in the press were willing to do so.
When a vocal critic of the intelligence that led to this utter failure to recast the Middle East in the form of American democracy spoke out against the assertion that yellow cake uranium was being sought by Iraq, the administration should have either demonstrated the claim was accurate before Bush made the assertion in his State of the Union address, or abandoned the claim as unreliable — as most in the intelligence community, in the U.S. and abroad, had done so already. To “kill the messenger” (or in this case Wilson’s wife’s career) was the act of an administration heel-bent on cherry-picking intelligence to justify their already established goal to go to war, rather than to determine if a cridible threat existed that justified putting Americans in harms way.
Were your daughter serving in Iraq, rather than appearing on CNN, would you be so kind to an administration bent on war, cooking the intelligence, and using fear to gain compliance from the populous?
The fact that this administration politicized the intelligence gathering process, leading to a distorted view of the threat, served the neocon agenda nicely. And by leaking the name of a covert CIA agent in reprisal for Wilson speaking truth to power shows this administration for what it is — and administration who will be remembered not for embracing the idea that we have nothing to feat by fear itself, but rather we have nothing but fear-mongering to justify the rush to war, and damn anyone who questions our assessment of the threat.
With close to 4000 dead and 15000 seriously wounded, and our Nation’s treasure squandered, on a war that was sold to the nation using an ever-evolving justification — WMD;, no, democracy,; no stability in the region….
This outing is just on act of many that illustrates why Bush will go down in history as our worst president ever.