[almost] Federal Inmate No. 28301-016 — the reads

July 6th, 2007

Big Dog commentary, save it for the weekend if you like — Krugman, Scheer, Blumenthal, Swanson, Pitt, more.

Jude

Sacrifice Is for Suckers
Paul Krugman, Welcome to Pottersville
Friday, July 06, 2007

On this Fourth of July, President Bush compared the Iraq war to the Revolutionary War, and called for “more patience, more courage and more sacrifice.” Unfortunately, it seems that nobody asked the obvious question: “What sacrifices have you and your friends made, Mr. President?”

On second thought, there would be no point in asking that question. In Mr. Bush’s world, only the little people make sacrifices.

You see, the Iraq war, although Mr. Bush insists that it’s part of a Global War on Terror™, a fight to the death between good and evil, isn’t like America’s other great wars — wars in which the wealthy shared the financial burden through higher taxes and many members of the elite fought for their country.

This time around, Mr. Bush celebrated Mission Accomplished by cutting tax rates on dividends and capital gains, while handing out huge no-bid contracts to politically connected corporations. And in the four years since, as the insurgency Mr. Bush initially taunted with the cry of “Bring them on” has claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and left thousands more grievously wounded, the children of the elite — especially the Republican elite — have been conspicuously absent from the battlefield.

The Bushies, it seems, like starting fights, but they don’t believe in paying any of the cost of those fights or bearing any of the risks. Above all, they don’t believe that they or their friends should face any personal or professional penalties for trivial sins like distorting intelligence to get America into an unnecessary war, or totally botching that war’s execution.

The Web site Think Progress has a summary of what happened to the men behind the war after we didn’t find W.M.D., and weren’t welcomed as liberators: “The architects of war: Where are they now?” To read that summary is to be awed by the comprehensiveness and generosity of the neocon welfare system. Even Paul Wolfowitz, who managed the rare feat of messing up not one but two high-level jobs, has found refuge at the American Enterprise Institute.

Which brings us to the case of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby Jr.

The hysteria of the neocons over the prospect that Mr. Libby might actually do time for committing perjury was a sight to behold. In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled “Fallen Soldier,” Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University cited the soldier’s creed: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” He went on to declare that “Scooter Libby was a soldier in your — our — war in Iraq.”

Ah, yes. Shuffling papers in an air-conditioned Washington office is exactly like putting your life on the line in Anbar or Baghdad. Spending 30 months in a minimum-security prison, with a comfortable think-tank job waiting at the other end, is exactly like having half your face or both your legs blown off by an I.E.D.

What lay behind the hysteria, of course, was the prospect that for the very first time one of the people who tricked America into war, then endangered national security yet again in the effort to cover their tracks, might pay some price. But Mr. Ajami needn’t have worried.

Back when the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity began, Mr. Bush insisted that if anyone in his administration had violated the law, “that person will be taken care of.” Now we know what he meant. Mr. Bush hasn’t challenged the verdict in the Libby case, and other people convicted of similar offenses have spent substantial periods of time in prison. But Mr. Libby goes free.

Oh, and don’t fret about the fact that Mr. Libby still had to pay a fine. Does anyone doubt that his friends will find a way to pick up the tab?

Mr. Bush says that Mr. Libby’s punishment remains “harsh” because his reputation is “forever damaged.” Meanwhile, Mr. Bush employs, as a deputy national security adviser, none other than Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty to unlawfully withholding information from Congress in the Iran-contra affair. Mr. Abrams was one of six Iran-contra defendants pardoned by Mr. Bush’s father, who was himself a subject of the special prosecutor’s investigation of the scandal.

In other words, obstruction of justice when it gets too close to home is a family tradition. And being a loyal Bushie means never having to say you’re sorry.

Independence Day for Libby
Robert Scheer, TruthDig
Jul 3, 2007

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 Dick 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.

Bush and Cheney walk, too
Even as the president confesses that Scooter Libby engaged in a cover-up — after all, that was the verdict — he completes the ultimate obstruction of justice in the Plame affair.
Sidney Blumenthal, Salon
July 3, 2007

In the Plame case, as in nearly every matter, Vice President Dick Cheney controlled and directed the flow of information that shaped the decision making of President George W. Bush. When Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, published “Missing in Action: Truth,” on May 6, 2003, referring to but not mentioning by name former Ambassador Joseph Wilson as one who conducted a mission to Niger, where he found no evidence of Saddam Hussein seeking to purchase yellowcake uranium for nuclear weaponry, Cheney furiously launched the effort to discover Wilson’s identity and to discredit him. He ordered I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, his chief of staff, to head the operation. Libby’s frenetic activity triggered a secret State Department investigation and memo that identified Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA operative.

Cheney aroused President Bush to the danger from Wilson. A handwritten note by Libby that surfaced in his trial revealed that Bush raised his concern about the Kristof column in a subsequent June 9 meeting. The next day, the State Department memo “Niger/Iraq Uranium Story” began circulating within the administration. On June 12, Cheney identified Plame to Libby, and Libby went hard to work. Within three days, he discussed Plame with five officials. On July 6, after Wilson published a New York Times op-ed disclosing that the rationale the president gave for the war was premised on false information, an enraged Cheney ordered Libby into high gear. Cheney also secured Bush’s concurrence for Libby to leak selected parts of the still-classified National Intelligence Estimate on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction to New York Times reporter Judith Miller on July 8. Bush, therefore, was deeply involved. But what did the president know, and when did he know it?

Bush’s commutation of Libby’s 30-month prison sentence for four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice was as politically necessary to hold his remaining hardcore base for the rest of his 18 months in office as it was politically damaging to his legacy and to the possibility of a Republican succession. It was also essential in order to sustain Libby’s cover-up protecting Cheney and perhaps Bush himself.

The sole reason that Bush offers for the commutation — that Judge Reggie Walton’s sentence was “excessive” — is transparently false. Indeed, the sentence meets the normal guidelines for such a crime. “The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country,” said Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor. “In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws.” Nothing is irregular or extraordinary about the length of the sentence, except the person receiving it.

It was not the judge who exceeded the sentencing guidelines; it is the president who ignored federal standards for commutations, by which it is customary that the convicted person serve some time before being eligible. Dishonestly appealing to the letter of the law, Bush’s spirit of impunity is masked as benevolence and mercy.

Even as Bush attacked the judgment of Walton, his own appointee to the federal bench, he acknowledged Libby’s guilt, declaring: “I respect the jury’s verdict.” Even as Bush engages in juridical nullification, he does not seek jury nullification. By confessing that Libby was engaged in a cover-up — after all, that was the verdict — Bush establishes his own motive. In brief, Bush’s act ratifies Libby’s cover-up. The “cloud over the vice president” that the prosecutor decried will never be dispelled. Cheney — and Bush — walk, too.

Libby had to have understood, without a word ever being passed, that leniency of some sort would be granted. His steadfast cover-up was encouraged by his intimate knowledge of the methods of Cheney and Bush. The fine he must pay — $250,000 — is meaningless because he will certainly not be paying it himself. His legal defense fund, supported by the friends of the president and vice president, boasts a treasury of $5 million. He has been well taken care of.

The pardon is the one monarchical power that the framers of the Constitution assigned the presidency. But they placed one restriction, that it could not be exercised for impeachment. In other words, the president could not use his power to pardon himself. Bush is entirely within his narrow right to use the pardon power in the Libby case. But it violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law governing that power because it is a consummate gesture of self-exoneration, at least if the vice president is an “entity within the executive branch.”

Bush rewards Libby’s cover-up, thwarting the investigation into Cheney’s and perhaps his culpability. Bush’s commutation is the successful culmination of the obstruction of justice.
Since 1776, on every July Fourth, the Declaration of Independence has been posted in public places, published in newspapers and read aloud. Its bill of particulars contains these two passages defining royal tyranny and justifying revolution:

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers. … For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.

Happy Fourth.

When Presidents Pardon Their Own Crimes
Scooter and the Commuter
DAVID SWANSON, CounterPunch
July 3, 2007

George Mason (1725-1792), the father of the Bill of Rights (1791-2002), argued at the Constitutional Convention in favor of providing the House of Representatives the power of impeachment by pointing out that the President might use his pardoning power to “pardon crimes which were advised by himself” or, before indictment or conviction, “to stop inquiry and prevent detection.”

James Madison (1751-1836), the father of the U.S. Constitution (1788-2007), added that “if the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.”

Of course, Bush has long been connected in a suspicious manner to Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and others. Madison would probably have called for Bush’s impeachment when Bush first refused to investigate or hold anyone accountable for leaking Valerie Plame’s identity, or rather when Bush lied us into the war in the first place, or when he confessed to illegal spying, or when he detained people without charge and tortured them, or when he overturned laws with signing statements or refused to comply with subpoenas, and so on and so forth. Madison wouldn’t have wanted to see his Constitution tossed aside until the moment Bush commuted Libby’s sentence. But he certainly would have acted now if not before.

The trial of Scooter Libby produced overwhelming evidence that Vice President Cheney personally led the campaign to attack Joe Wilson through the media. This “get Wilson” campaign included telling numerous reporters that Wilson was sent to Niger by his wife Valerie Plame, a CIA operative. Cheney was told by the CIA that Plame worked as a covert agent in the CIA’s Nonproliferation Division, which is the critical division of the CIA responsible for stopping the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Cheney’s efforts to expose Plame actually exposed her entire covert network, at tremendous cost to the CIA’s secret war against terrorism. If Plame’s work had been exposed by a double-agent in our government like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen, that person would face prosecution for espionage and treason. The evidence of Cheney’s role is more than enough to start an impeachment investigation. And, of course, a hand-written note from Cheney, introduced as evidence in the trial, implicated the President.

The Libby trial also exposed the lead role of Vice President Cheney’s office in manipulating pre-war intelligence to defraud Congress into authorizing the invasion of Iraq. Sworn testimony revealed that Cheney’s office managed the evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, all of which proved to be lies. Cheney personally visited the CIA several times before the invasion to pressure the CIA to distort pre-war intelligence. And Cheney exerted “constant” pressure on the Republican former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee to stall an investigation into the Bush administration’s use of flawed intelligence on Iraq, according to the new chairman, Senator Jay Rockefeller.

Libby’s crime was obstructing an investigation that appeared to be headed for Cheney and possibly Bush. The proper course of action for Congress, in the face of Bush commuting Libby’s sentence, is to begin impeachment hearings against Cheney and then Bush. With the White House openly disobeying a stack of subpoenas, it is finally clear that impeachment is the only possible check on Bush-Cheney power remaining to Congress. In fact, in the wake of Bush’s Scooter commuting, the following people all released statements condemning Bush’s action and recommending that Congress and the public do absolutely nothing about it: Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson. In contrast, Joe Biden recommended that the public phone the White House and complain. That ought to show them!

Bush has just obstructed justice. His act of commuting Libby’s sentence itself adds one more small item to the pile of impeachable offenses. Congressman Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. (D-IL), had the right reaction, releasing the following statement:

“In her first weeks as leader of the Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi withdrew the notion of impeachment proceedings against either President Bush or Vice President Cheney [actually she did that 8 months earlier, and Jackson began parroting her line right away, but who's counting]. With the president’s decision to once again subvert the legal process and the will of the American people by commuting the sentence of convicted felon Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, I call on House Democrats to reconsider impeachment proceedings. Lewis Libby was convicted of lying under oath to cover up the outing of active, undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame. It is beyond unthinkable that the president would undermine the legal process to protect a man who engaged in treason against the United States government, threatening the security of the American people. In November’s election, voters put Democrats in charge of Congress because they believed our pledge of oversight and accountability. Now it’s time for us to honor that pledge. The Executive Branch should be held responsible for its illegalities. Our democratic system is grounded in the principle of checks and balances. When the Executive Branch disregards the will of the people, our lawmakers must not be silent. Today’s actions, coupled with the president’s unwillingness to comply with Senate and House inquiries, leave Democrats with no other option than to consider impeachment so that we can gather the information needed to achieve justice for all Americans.”

Very well said. It’s tremendous to see Jackson come around. There’s only one problem. Congressman Dennis Kucinich has introduced articles of impeachment against Cheney. Ten other Congress Members have signed on. And Jackson isn’t one of them. Rep. Jackson and every other member of Congress needs to do one of three things now: Sign onto Kucinich’s bill, H Res 333, www.impeachcheney.org , or introduce new articles of impeachment against Cheney or Bush, or crawl out of town in fear and eternal shame.

Now, the articles that Kucinich has introduced focus on war, and some Congress Members, terrified as they might be to fight in a war, are equally terrified of NOT sending other people to kill and die. Now would be the moment to introduce new articles of impeachment against Cheney for his role in the retribution against Wilson, for illegal spying, for torture, and for refusing subpoenas. Or take your pick of the available menu of offenses and choose your three favorites: www.impeachcheney.org

And now would be the time for Nancy Pelosi to announce that she could not possibly have meant that impeachment would stay off the table no matter what, that she meant it was not on the table at that time. Numerous crimes and abuses have come to light since that table clearing moment. Pelosi is in the clear. She can renew her oath to uphold the Constitution. Or she can go down in history as the appeaser of the new dictatorial U.S. regime, as the person who looked fascism in the face and said “That looks worth allowing to happen as long as we win in 2008,” and whose party went down in bitter flames in 2008 because the American people still cared about their democracy.

Now is the moment for members of the public to act. Go to your Congress Member’s office. Sit down. Read the U.S. Constitution aloud. Do not leave until they take you to jail. Or come to Washington, D.C., and do the same thing–but do it in the office of Congressman John Conyers, who is in the position to save this Republic in a week, who has the knowledge and the skill to do it, and who has absolutely no constitutional duty to step and fetch or bow and scrape for Miss Nancy.

On His Last Day in Office, Bush Will Pardon Himself and Cheney
Brent Budowsky, The Hill
July 3, 2007

Congress should devise a set of subpoenas that would call the president and vice president to testify about actions that could constitute violations of law and set the stage for a historic Supreme Court decision that would determine whether any president is above the law.

George H. W. Bush charged that those who disclose the identities of covert operatives are committing the equivalent of treason, while George W. Bush believes that those who lie under oath about such matters should receive less jail time than Paris Hilton.

When the president stated he would not intervene in this case until all appeals had been heard, the president was lying.

A majority of Americans believes George W. Bush does not tell the truth. An overwhelming majority of Americans has come to disrespect and disapprove of this president. Throughout the free world there is revulsion and disgust about what this man has done.

Things are being done in this corrupt and failed administration that should never happen in America and have never happened before, in this way, to this magnitude.

Justice Robert Jackson, in his summation at Nuremberg, spoke at length about the ideals of justice being open, decisions being made in public, charges being filed, the law being respected, right to counsel being provided and the common standards of jurisprudence and civilization behind honored.

Never before in American history has any president so casually claimed the power to violate the Bill of Rights and Constitution through secret acts in violation of commonly accepted law.

Never before has an American president claimed unitary powers to violate statutes though signing statements on such a regular and unprecedented scale.

Never before has an American president tried to impose secret courts, secret trials, secret files and secret charges, using secret forms of what the civilized world calls torture, often without the right to counsel, often imprisoning and torturing detainees without filing charges.

Never before has an American president had a vice president who boasts about working on the dark side, and conducts a virtual super-secret government from the vice president’s office while he desperately tries to keep truth from law, and bullies and intimidates those who disagree.

Never before has an American president named and kept an attorney general who defames the very notions of justice in America, devalues the very ideals that our Founding Fathers held so dear, defrauds the nation in public testimony and destroys the entire upper echelon of the administration of justice in America.

Thousands of Gold Star mothers know the price of these transgressions and the pain that has flowed from these obsessions, lies, frauds and misrepresentations that have led our country into the tragedy of Iraq.

Torture in violation of decency and law, secret eavesdropping in violation of constitutional history beyond the reach of the courts and the Congress, lies under oath, slanders of political opponents, Abu Ghraib crimes and the cover-up charged by the general of such integrity he could stay silent no longer — the list of wrongs is long.

Knowing of these crimes more than our people or our system of justice, fearing the exposure that is ultimately inevitable, and well aware of the legal consequences I expect the president, on his last day in office, to issue a series of pardons that would include himself and the vice president.

These pardons would include a list of those most legally vulnerable to the long litany of wrongs, done in secret, but destined for exposure.

Congress should call the leading constitutional authorities in the nation, and devise a series of subpoenas to directly call the president and the vice president to testify on matters that could involve violations of law. This would lead to a historic test case that would decide, once and for all, whether Thomas Paine was right when he stated that in monarchies the king is law, but in America, the law is king.

Libby’s Pardon: The Failure of Mr. Bush
Pierre Tristam, Candide’s Notebooks
Tuesday, July 3, 2007

There was always something excessively distasteful about the Lewis Libby trial. It wasn’t the five felony counts of lying to investigators and misleading a grand jury, or his conviction on four of them, or what it revealed of the incestuous corruptions between the nodes of power and the Washington press corps that did so much to cover up the larger crime the Libby trial danced around (the Iraq war). It wasn’t even that Libby’s conviction had nothing to do with the original offense (the leaking of Valerie Plame’s name). The distaste about it all was that it was a farce from the start—an unwitting show trial headed for its inevitable dismantling at the hands of a president to whom even the Department of Justice is a basement annex in a machinery of expedience.

What Bush calls a compromise is, of course, a pardon. That Libby still has a $250,000 fine to pay, that he’s on probation, that he can’t practice law anymore is all beside the point. The money he owes will be raised in a day’s radiothon. It doesn’t take a law degree to practice lobbying, to rake in money on the talk circuit, to play adviser to scoundrels, to be in the shadows of Dick Cheney’s shadows all over again. Fines and probation and ruined careers affect ordinary people. Libby is no ordinary man. He is a Bush administration Untouchable, taking one for the team and being rewarded for it. And still, the Wall Street Journal found room to excoriate Bush for not giving the full pardon, for playing into the half-guilt of a man who “deserved better from the President whose policies he tried to defend when others were running for cover.”

“But by failing to issue a full pardon,” the Journal wrote, “Mr. Bush is evading responsibility for the role his Administration played in letting the Plame affair build into fiasco and, ultimately, this personal tragedy.” That about sums up the neocon re-writing of the last five years. Just as Oliver North managed to single-handedly turn the Reagan Administration’s illegal war (and war crimes) in Central America into a cause for the “just,” for “freedom fighters” and apple pie, just as Oliver North managed to turn the Iran-Contra scandal from what should have led to Reagan’s impeachment into another springboard to ideological vindication and (for North) stardom, Lewis Libby, in the reactionaries’ eyes, is single-handedly deflecting the tragedy and crimes of the Iraq war onto his own supposed personal valor and loyalty, his sacrifice, his, if the Journal is to be believed, honesty.

It wasn’t about cooking up a false case for war, nor about manufacturing the demolition of a country on the basis of that lie (a lie even now the Journal denies when it writes about “Joe Wilson’s original, false accusation about pre-war intelligence”). It was about a man standing up for just policies leading to a just war that a special prosecutor’s zeal and a liberal press’ hatred for America ruined for all of us.

The symbolic temptation is to think that by pardoning Libby, Bush is pardoning himself of whatever crimes he committed. But that would presume a sense of justice at the core of the president’s thinking. What the pardon shows in as stark a light as any aborting of justice Bush has orchestrated is his utter contempt for the law, for the very system he defends but has never upheld. But if he and Cheney have been so easily amused at making buffalo chips of due process in their so-called global war on terror, in Guantanamo, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, what should, what could keep them from doing the same at home?

I’m reminded of an Onion story a year ago spoofing that book by San Francisco Chronicle reporters about Barry Bonds’ steroid abuse: “With the publication of a book detailing steroid use by San Francisco Giants superstar Barry Bonds, two San Francisco Chronicle reporters have corroborated the claims of Bonds’ steroid abuse made by every single person who has watched or even loosely followed the game of baseball over the past five years.” The logo that accompanied the story said it all: “No Shit.”

The other inevitable comparison that comes to mind is the Gerald Ford pardon of Nixon in 1974. It was a bit revolting, back in December when Ford died, to read once again the press’ toadying over that pardon. Seen at the time as an insult to the Constitution, it’s been revised since as a “healing” gesture that spared the country more anguish than it needed. As if the United States were an infant, an emotionally deranged democracy that needed cuddling above all. Cuddling Ford provided. But the Times was right at the time, headlining its editorial plainly enough: “The Failure of Mr. Ford.” Not President Ford, mind you, but Mr. Ford: By pardoning Nixon, Ford had abjured his claim to the title. He had, in the Times’ words, “affronted the Constitution and the American system of justice.” Odd how the reasons Ford gave for his pardon dovetail those Bush gave for Libby’s. Nixon/Libby suffered enough. Bush/Ford had to act on his own conscience. Far from a healing act, the Nixon pardon laid the groundwork for the erosion of justice at its core, making pardons like Libby’s the required routine rather than the surprise.

And still in the end the Libby cesspool adds up to nothing more than the last act in a predictable made-for-television movie. If you’re looking at all this through the eyes of an Iraqi, the war crimes carry on untouched, the demolition of Iraq is complete, the mocking of the American justice system continues apace, with Alberto Gonzales at Justice, Dick Cheney at the vice-presidency, and, at the center of it all, Mr. Bush, the criminal-in-chief, oblivious, in our face, unrepentant, and even, from time to time, sainted by the very press that continues the incestuous relationship with power that got us this far down the drain pipes: “Bush,” the Post wrote in a half-fawning, half-horrified profile on Monday, “has virtually given up on winning converts while in office and instead is counting on vindication after he is dead. ‘He almost has . . . a sense of fatalism,’ said Rep. Peter T. King ( R-N.Y.), who recently spent a day traveling with Bush. ‘All he can do is do his best, and 100 years from now people will decide if he was right or wrong. It doesn’t seem to be a false, macho pride or living in your own world. I find him to be amazingly calm.’”

Isn’t that what was said of Saddam on the scaffold?

Libby: One More Twist in the Yellowcake Road
Michael Winship, CommonDreams
Tuesday, July 3, 2007 by

So much for, “No man is above the law.”

The chief prosecutor, jury, trial judge — a Republican he himself appointed to the bench. The federal appeals panel. The majority of public opinion. All ignored.

I know, I know. The president was within his constitutional rights commuting Scooter Libby’s sentence for perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice. Article Two, Section 2 and all that. He claimed Libby’s two-and-a-half-year prison sentence was “excessive.”

But Bush’s action does violate the official Department of Justice’s Standards for Considering Commutation Petitions (”Requests for commutation generally are not accepted unless and until a person has begun serving that sentence. Nor are commutation requests generally accepted from persons who are presently challenging their convictions or sentences through appeal or other court proceeding.”)

And keep in mind, this is a man who famously pledged during the 2000 campaign, “In my administration, we will ask not only what is legal, but what is right; not what the lawyers allow, but what the public deserves.”

Nor was the announcement of Libby’s commutation exactly what you’d call a Profile in Courage. President Bush didn’t come out and make a public statement to the media and the country he’s supposed to lead. Instead, a brief press release slithered out as he returned to Washington after his Kennebunk meet with Vladimir Putin.

That’s the kind of guy this president is. You just know that if the Internet had been around when Dubya was in school he would have broken up with a girl via e-mail rather than tell her face-to-face.

Yes, it’s a sop to George Bush’s conservative base at a time when part of the reason for his basement-level approval ratings is vast right-wing dissatisfaction (Even the coquettish Ann Coulter called President Bush a “nincompoop” last week. Monday’s Washington Post described him as “a president who has endured the most drastic political collapse in a generation… No modern president has experienced such a sustained rejection by the American public.”).

But that’s not the real story. Nor is the story the crimes for which Libby was going to prison. It’s not even the original outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent by Libby, Karl Rove and others.

It’s the continuing effort to hide the truth behind the Iraq war; that we had no overwhelmingly compelling reason to invade that country, especially when so much remained — and remains — to be done against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The accusations that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden were false. And long before war began, the reported existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was known to be a sham.

The visit of Valerie Plame’s husband Joe Wilson to Niger to investigate allegations that the African country was selling yellowcake uranium to Iraq was just part of the unraveling of the WMD hoax. That’s why the administration sought to hide his findings and discredit him, leading Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, to leak Plame’s name and then lie about it.

In the current New York Review of Books, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and espionage expert Thomas Powers uses a spate of recent memoirs to dismantle the notion that the belief in the existence of Iraqi WMD’s was just an honest intelligence mistake. He writes that according to Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA’s European division, as early as the evening after 9/11, David Manning, foreign policy advisor to Tony Blair, said to CIA director George Tenet, “I hope we all can agree that we should concentrate on Afghanistan and not be tempted to launch any attacks on Iraq.”

Tenet replied, “Absolutely. We all agree on that. Some might want to link the issues but none of us wants to go that route.”

But Cheney did and so did Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Libby and the other members of the neocon gang. George Bush quickly was on board, too.

When the vice president’s attempts to prove a link between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence proved unsuccessful, they ramped up the WMD wardrums with stories of aluminum tubes for centrifuges, mobile weapons labs and yellowcake. Powers writes, “The claim that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger was not only weak but was based, if that is the word, on evidence, if that is the word, that was fabricated in so obvious a manner that the CIA claims not to have seen the documents till very late in the day.”

In fact, the yellowcake story had been dismissed as bogus by European intelligence agencies even before 9/11, and when shown some documents in the spring of 2002, the French spy in charge of WMD investigations said, “All it took was a glance. They were junk. Crude fakes.” Joe Wilson’s fact-finding trip to Niger provided further evidence of the scam.

Powers reports, “The yellowcake story didn’t stand up for long, but it didn’t need to stand up for long. An echo effect put it into play after Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, included it in the list of scary signs that Saddam was preparing trouble for the world: ‘The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’”

By the time Secretary of State Colin Powell eliminated the yellowcake story from his February 2003 speech before the UN, the damage was done. And it was better if Joe Wilson and his wife’s reputations were besmirched than to have the true story believed.

In his official statement, President Bush says believes it’s Libby’s reputation that has been “forever damaged,” adding, “his wife and young children have also suffered immensely.”

Nearly 3600 American men and women and an estimated more than 70,000 Iraqi civilians are dead in Iraq. Their families suffer immensely. Scooter Libby, aka Federal Inmate No. 28301-016, walks free.

Was Commuting Libby an Impeachable Offense?
William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Tuesday 03 July 2007

Let me get this straight.

Like a thief in the night, George W. Bush commuted the prison sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. He made no public appearance to announce the decision, but instead air-mailed a written statement after 5 p.m. at the outset of a midweek holiday. The statement praised Patrick Fitzgerald as “a highly qualified, professional prosecutor who carried out his responsibilities as charged.” As for Libby himself, the statement noted that “the consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant, and private citizen will be long-lasting.”

Not 24 hours later, Bush delivered a stammering, vacillating, nervous public statement defending his decision to commute Libby’s prison sentence. During his statement, Bush made it clear that a full and complete pardon for Libby was still very much on the table.

Quite the boomerang, yes? Bush respected Fitzgerald, the truth, the jury and the rule of law on Monday night, but didn’t respect these things in the morning. Mr. Bush, in doing so, has proven himself once again to be a quintessential moral philanderer, screwing around with justice at a whim, a serial cheater and a man who absolutely cannot be trusted.

Libby was part of a White House plot to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose early criticism of the administration’s Iraq claims were deemed a grave threat to the policy. The White House attacked Wilson by exposing his wife, Valerie Plame, as a deep-cover CIA operative. This exposure destroyed the intelligence network she had created to track any person, nation or group that might give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Libby lied under oath and obstructed justice to cover up these White House activities, and to protect Vice President Dick Cheney from scrutiny and censure for his direct role in the plot.

Despite these serious crimes, Libby will spend less time in prison than Paris Hilton, Martha Stewart and Susan MacDougal. The same Republicans who championed the impeachment of Bill Clinton now celebrate Libby’s liberation from the consequences of the very same acts they accused Clinton of committing.

Beyond Bush’s two-faced blather about potential pardons are details and possibilities of vast complexity.

By commuting the prison sentence, Bush left Libby’s 5th Amendment rights intact. Thus, any Congressional committee or prosecutor wishing to call him to testify will have to immunize him from any potential legal repercussions arising from his testimony. If Bush chooses to fully pardon Libby, those 5th Amendment protections will go right out the window.

Libby has repeatedly stated his intention to go on with the appeals process so he can clear his name. If he does this and an appeal is granted, Patrick Fitzgerald will suddenly be back in business, because a granted appeal opens the way for a whole new trial. Libby, if granted this appeal, may well be tried and convicted all over again.

Appeals are commonly granted only if a mistake was made during the initial trial, a difficult standard to meet, which is why most appeals are not granted. Should Libby’s team decide to base their appeal on the spurious claim that Patrick Fitzgerald was not properly authorized to prosecute the case to begin with, however, the playing field would be changed dramatically because Fitzgerald would no longer be in a position to retry the case. If the appeals court grants an appeal based on this argument, one would be forced to wonder if that court acted in collusion with the administration.

Hovering above all this is one all-encompassing question: did George W. Bush commit a dead-bang impeachable offense by commuting Libby’s sentence?

A wise man once said that the life of the law is procedure. There are processes to be undertaken, papers to be filed and forms to be obeyed. In this commutation, no procedures whatsoever appear to have been followed. The haste in which this action was undertaken smacks of fear, desperation, and of a cover-up in process.

Consider the factors.

Libby’s legal defense from the first day of his trial was that he was a fall guy taking the rap for others.

Fitzgerald pointedly stated that the details surrounding Libby’s actions put a cloud of suspicion over Vice President Dick Cheney.

Combine these two details and you wind up with Libby standing as a patsy taking the rap for Cheney.

Bush has the constitutional power to offer commutations, of course. But if this commutation was granted to Libby in order to derail a criminal investigation, if it was granted to cover up prior or ongoing criminal activities, that is itself a crime meriting the impeachment of George W. Bush.

This, more than anything else, must be investigated.

Senator Leahy, Representative Waxman, Representative Conyers and any other Congressional chairmen must absolutely and actively work to get to the bottom of this. If doing so requires immunizing Libby to secure his testimony, so be it. Calling Patrick Fitzgerald to testify on these matters is likewise required; the idea that he can safely continue to refuse comment must be dismissed. Fitzgerald cannot make statements about clouds over Cheney, in light of this new situation, and still be allowed to stand in silence. The lawyers assembling Joe Wilson’s civil suit should subpoena Libby into a deposition room and grill him, whether or not he stands on his 5th Amendment rights.

This isn’t over by a long chalk, unless our representatives and law-enforcement officials choose the safe path - public statements, toothless accusations, substanceless denunciations - in lieu of true and effective action. The rule of law itself is on the hook here. This cannot be allowed to stand.

Let’s Have a Look at Scooter Libby’s ‘Exceptional Public Service’
Jon Ponder, Pinsitore Review
Jul. 4, 2007

When Pres. George Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s prison sentence on Monday, he cited Libby’s “years of exceptional public service.” A casual observer might be surprised to learn Libby has been an “exceptional” public servant, since what is generally known about him is that he was a necon bureaucrat whose claim to fame prior to his crimes was his role in assisting Pres. Bush and Vice Pres. Dick Cheney in taking the country to war under false pretexts.

Libby is the first sitting White House official to be indicted since the Grant administration. He is also the highest ranking White House official convicted in a government scandal since National Security Adviser John Poindexter in the Iran-Contra affair in 1990.

Having been found guilty of lying to a federal grand jury and FBI investigators and obstructing an investigation into an alleged White House conspiracy to reveal the identity of a covert CIA specialist in WMD, Libby has secured his place in history as the first sitting White House official to be indicted since the administration of U.S. Grant, a Republican, in the 1870s. He is also the highest-ranking White House official convicted in a government scandal since National Security Adviser John Poindexter, also a Republican, in the Iran-Contra affair in 1990.

Libby met Paul Wolfowitz at Yale. Wolfowitz became his mentor, and the two have worked together off and on over the years. Ironically, their separate roles in the Bush administration have led both men to fall from grace on parallel tracks. While Libby was under investigation, Wolfowitz resigned from the Pentagon, reportedly because of his role in botching the war. Around the time of Libby’s trial, Wolfowitz was forced out of the World Bank amid corruption charges.

At the White House, as the vice president’s chief of staff, Libby was Cheney’s closest confidante. Libby rode to work with Cheney every morning and was by his side throughout the day. He once told CNN’s Larry King, “I’m a great fan of the vice president. I think he’s one of the smartest, most honorable people I’ve ever met.”

Here are a few highlights from Scooter Libby’s bio:

Chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, assistant to the vice president for national security affairs, and an assistant to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005.

Served in various mid-level bureaucratic positions in Republican administrations at the Pentagon and at the State Dept., often working for Wolfowitz.

Was part of a network of neo-cons called the “Vulcans” that included Wolfowitz, Condoleeza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld.

In June 1997, he was a signatory on the “Statement of Principles” of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Libby was active in the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee of the Pentagon when it was chaired by Richard Perle during the early years of the George W. Bush administration.
Worked as a consultant for the defense contractor Northrop Grumman.

Served as a legal adviser to the United States House of Representatives.

Served on the advisory board of the RAND Corporation’s Center for Russia and Eurasia.

Worked for the American Bar Association.

RELATED

In private practice, Libby represented the fugitive billionaire Marc Rich, who was indicted by then-U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani 1983 on charges of tax evasion and illegal trading with Iran. Libby was apparently not representing Rich in January 2001 when Rich was pardoned by Pres. Bill Clinton. Later that year, however, Libby testified before a GOP congressional committee investigating the Rich pardon that the prosecutor, presumably Giuliani had “misconstrued the facts and the law” when he indicted Rich.

While it can’t be considered “public service” or “exceptional,” Libby was also author of “The Apprentice,” a novel that included plot lines about bestiality, pedophilia and rape.
Conclusion

“Exceptional public service” can be defined many ways. Serving in the military and holding elective office come to mind. But there’s nothing like that in Libby’s bio.

The fact is, Scooter Libby may be a nice guy. Judging by the reaction from his friends in the capitol, he is popular on the cocktail circuit. But he is not “exceptional.” He has been up to his elbows in some of the worst policy disasters in our history, including a treasonous scheme to deceive the American people about the reasons the government invaded Iraq.

The only thing truly exceptional about Scooter Libby is his intimate knowledge of questionable activities the president and vice president are desperate to keep secret. If this is true, then Pres. Bush pardoned Libby to buy his silence — and that is unquestionably an illegal act.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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