The Discerning Texan

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Plame

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Media Bias, Patrick Fitzgerald, Plame, Travesty of Justice

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Media Bias, Plame, Travesty of Justice

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Media Bias, Plame, Travesty of Justice

... On July 6, 2003, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV charged in the New York Times that the administration had manipulated intelligence findings in order to rationalize the invasion of Iraq. He knew this, Wilson wrote in a lengthy op-ed, because he himself had been sent to Africa by the CIA a year earlier to investigate a report that Niger was supplying uranium ore to Iraq. He had come across nothing to support this allegation. Yet not only had his negative finding been ignored by the administration, but the President, in his January 2003 State of the Union address, specifically invoked the supposed connection between Saddam Hussein and Niger. “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war,” Wilson summarized, “I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

A week after Wilson’s op-ed appeared, someone leaked to the press that the ambassador’s wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was employed by the CIA as a covert agent, and that her husband’s trip to Niger had been little more than a “junket” conducted at her behest. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), signed into law in 1982, it is a felony knowingly to divulge the identity of a covert agent (if the information was received through official channels). The disclosure of Mrs. Wilson’s identity, jeopardizing her undercover work for the CIA and potentially compromising national security, might have constituted a violation of IIPA—this, in pursuit of a petty official vendetta against her husband for having dared challenge the Bush White House. In view of the seriousness of the possible offense, a government investigation ensued, leading in time to the trial of Scooter Libby.

The trouble with this narrative is that Libby was not the source of the information; nor was he ever charged with the crime of leaking it. This, however, has not appeared to trouble his accusers. As Joseph Wilson would put it after the trial, Libby’s conviction for perjury rather than for violating the IIPA was like putting Al Capone behind bars for tax evasion; when you are dealing with known criminals, the particular crime you catch them at is less important than catching them at all. Similarly, in the judgment of Max Frankel, the former executive editor of the New York Times (writing in the Sunday Times Magazine), the essential point to be gleaned from the trial is that Libby was indeed engaged in a White House campaign to expose Mrs. Wilson and discredit her husband; the fact that the information about her was first leaked through other channels was a matter only of happenstance, or perhaps incompetence.

But despite the wishes of those who take their history via synecdoche, this reading of the Libby trial is wrong on every point. Indeed, for a trial that is said to have been about the nature of truth-telling and lying, it is amazing how mistaken is the impression most people have both of the proceeding itself and of its meaning. This is the case not only for Libby’s enemies but also for his defenders, who tend to construe his fall as a tale of tragic personal sacrifice in the name of a higher cause—protecting his superiors and, through them, the continued prosecution of the war against terror. In fact, it is a tale of something else entirely.

Labels: Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald, Plame, Travesty of Justice

Labels: Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Plame

Labels: Democrat Sabotage, Nutroots, Patrick Fitzgerald, Plame

Labels: Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald, Plame, Travesty of Justice

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Democrat Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Plame

Labels: Democrat Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Media Bias, Media War, Plame

... the news that Ms. Plame is so covert that not even she knows if she is legally covert is the stuff of late night comedy. This is from Mr. Apuzzo:Plame also repeatedly described herself as a covert operative, a term that has multiple meanings. Plame said she worked undercover and traveled abroad on secret missions for the CIA.

But the word "covert" also has a legal definition requiring recent foreign service and active efforts to keep someone's identity secret. Critics of Fitzgerald's investigation said Plame did not meet that definition for several reasons and said that's why nobody was charged with the leak.

...Plame said she wasn't a lawyer and didn't know what her legal status was but said it shouldn't have mattered to the officials who learned her identity.

Labels: Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Plame

Scooter Libby is a convicted perjurer because the United States Department of Justice grossly abused its power and because politics short-circuited all the safeguards that are supposed to prevent such abuses. This is one of the most appalling perversions of a civilized judicial system since France sent Alfred Dreyfus to Devil's Island because the ruling elite didn't like Jews.

If the appellate and executive review processes fail as badly as the investigative and trial processes did in Libby's case, Libby will go to a federal penitentiary because Democrats don't like Republicans. There is enough shame in this outcome to go around.

Patrick Fitzgerald is a disgrace both to the legal profession and to the human race. His partisan allies, such as Senator Chuck Schumer and certain nameless bureaucrats at the CIA, are beneath contempt. The jury was unfit for its task, because it was apparently both prejudiced and intellectually incapable of noticing that the prosecution had no case. The trial judge lacked either the wit to see a gross miscarriage of justice unfolding before his eyes or the courage to stop it. But ultimate responsibility for Fitzgerald's outrageous misconduct lies with his boss.

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Plame

I have no idea whether Scooter Libby is a “good man” or a partisan hack, but I certainly hope he has a Bush pardon in his pocket or in his shoes I’d be making a break for the border. I never feel more foreign than when observing contemporary American justice, which seems to the outsider to have absolutely no sense of proportion. Mr Libby has been convicted of lying about his recollection of a conversation. The lies about who leaked Mrs Wilson’s name, the lies about what her husband was told in Niger and what he reported back to the CIA and how he got the job in the first place, all these are still out there. And in particular the leaker Armitage – who remained silent as the drip-drip-drip of speculation corroded the Administration’s integrity month in month out – remains a beloved figure on the social scene, full of delightful asides and amusing gossip. Only the peripheral lie about the minor lie arising from major lies is to be punished.

The Bush Administration can be faulted on several grounds for its conduct here, but one of its earliest errors was apologizing for the notorious “16 words” in the SOTU that started this thing:

''The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The British government stands by that statement. So does Lord Butler, in his investigation. In stepping back from the statement, the Administration showed an astonishing political ineptness, and in effect legitimized Wilson’s core grievance. Three years on, meanwhile, MI6, the French and others still know far more about what’s happening on the ground in Africa. The real scandal has always been that the world’s most lavishly endowed intelligence agency’s idea of an investigation is flying in a politically-motivated tourist for a long weekend.

Labels: Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Plame

Labels: Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Plame

Labels: Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Judicial, Libby, Plame

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Plame

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Judicial, Libby, Plame

Labels: Bush Administration, Libby, Media Bias, Plame

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Judicial, Libby, Plame, US Politics