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“Trial, no big deal” says the right
Conservatives and neoconservatives have been trying to whitewash the Scooter Libby trial ever since the beginning. In today’s Washington Post Robert Novak, the reporter who first printed Valerie Plame’s name, jumped on the bandwagon today and tried to repaint the evidence. Conservatives point to the fact that the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, did not charge anyone with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. He points the finger at Richard Armitage and states that he was the first one to tell him, Novak, about Valerie Plame. What he doesn’t point out is that Richard Armitage was not part of Cheney’s plot to discredit Joe Wilson. Richard Armitage, is the MacGuffin in this plot. He leads nowhere. The plot instead begins in the Vice President’s office.
Vice President Cheney and his right-hand man, Scooter Libby, began to think of ways to systematically destroy Joe Wilson’s story and credibility. The plan was not a single attack on the story or the man would get an attack on multiple fronts. First, “we didn’t send him.” This is where Vice President Cheney would flatly deny having anything to do with sending Joe Wilson to Niger. In fact, it was the vice presidents inquiry that prompted the CIA to send Joe Wilson. Why Joe Wilson? Many people have forgotten this point. Joe Wilson had been an ambassador to Niger. He had contacts in the area. He understood the manufacturing and the controls around uranium. At the time, he was nonpartisan and an excellent choice. Secondly, they wanted to discredit the origins of the trip. Create a cloud of confusion around the origins of the trip. For this, they injected Valerie Plame. They would say — she was the one who sent her husband on a “junket”. (Like a trip to Niger was equivalent to a trip to Maui.) Next, they picked specific journalists that they thought would be sympathetic to their case. These are journalists who have written positive stories about the White House and supported the war. Finally, they needed to tell the journalists something really juicy. Something to close the deal. Therefore, they decided to leak specific sections of the national intelligence estimate that supported their claims.
The Scooter Libby trial was about:
- outing of a CIA operative who happen to be covert
- leaking classified information for the purposes of destroying critics
- doing what was necessary in order to support a war
- the politics of personal attack and destruction
So, when Robert Novak writes that this was no Watergate, he is correct. He is correct if Watergate was about a break in. As we all know, Watergate was about more than a break-in, it was about the cover-up. It was about the lies. Watergate was about arrogance. The Scooter Libby trial was about covering up. The Scooter Libby trial was about lying. The Scooter Libby trial was about doing whatever was necessary to sell the war.
Finally, the neoconservatives complain that nobody was charged with leaking a CIA operative’s name. They also charge, that Valerie Plame was not a covert agent. Let’s take this last charge first. If she was not a covert agent then why did the CIA turn her name over to the Justice Department for investigation? Secondly, the Intelligence Identities Protection act was not written to capture someone who has leaked a CIA agent’s name once but instead someone who has intentionally leaked (and the operative word is intentionally) a covert agent’s name on multiple occasions. Because the law was written so narrowly it would be very difficult or impossible to convict Karl Rove, Scooter Libby or Dick Cheney therefore the special prosecutor decided not to go down this road.
Analysis of the Libby trial
David Shuster for MSNBC has been covering the whole Scooter Libby trial. He does an excellent synopsis.
General Impact of Libby verdict
When you think about it, the White House has had nearly an unprecedented run of bad news. Then again, after 9/11, they had an unprecedented run of legislative victories. Almost all of their victories were unopposed. The Patriot Act. Tax Cuts. More Tax Cuts. The authorization for the Iraq war. No Child left behind. Almost everything that the Bush administration proposed from September 2001 through August of 2005 was rammed through Congress almost completely and totally unopposed. Then, Katrina happened. I should back up, just a half a second, and note that Cindy Sheehan happened in the summer of 2004. Cindy Sheehan was an interesting phenomenon. No matter how much she was vilified by the right, the American public didn’t buy it. She was the beginning of the awakening of the American public to the disaster that is the Bush Administration.
The American public has seen one disaster after another. The Iraq war. Hurricane Katrina. Wage stagnation. CEO pay inflation. Walter Reed. Now the Scooter Libby trial.
Waxman to hold hearings on Plame-CIA leak case
Many Americas want to know more about the CIA Leak case now that the jury has found I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby guilty of lying to the grand jury. Henry Waxman has promised to hold hearings. I suspect that repeating what we already know will be easy. Getting to Rove and Cheney will be very hard. The White House will fight Waxman every step of the way. Remember that every constitutional fight will end up in the Supreme Court (the same court that elected George W.)
The guy who killed efforts to fix the VA is now in charge of fixing the VA
Bob Woodruff interviewed Jim Nicholson (here and here) and it sure seemed that he said yes when the answer should have been no.
From ABC News:
A proposal to keep seriously wounded vets from falling through the cracks of the bureaucracy was shelved in 2005 when Jim Nicholson took over as the secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, according to the former VA employee who was responsible for tracking war casualties.
As a result, seriously wounded veterans continued to face long delays for health care and benefit payments after being discharged from the military, says former VA project manager Paul Sullivan. [Read more →]
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Errington C. Thompson, MD, is a surgeon, scholar, full-time sports fan and part-time political activist. He is active in a number of community projects and initiatives. Through medicine, he strives to improve the physical health of all he treats...
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