Time for Prez to pardon Libby
By Boston Herald editorial staff
Sunday, September 3, 2006
Now that the top deputy to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell has admitted he was the source of the revelation that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA, the case against Lewis “Scooter” Libby has become too trivial to pursue.
President Bush should pardon Libby, who was chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney until he was indicted on charges that he misled investigators and a grand jury about his conversations with reporters on the Plame story. (Libby asserts that he was so busy he simply misremembered who said what to whom about who sent Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, on an intelligence mission about Saddam Hussein’s hunt for uranium - a mission whose findings Wilson lied about.)
Chances of a conviction in Libby’s January trial, never good, are now nil. The special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, already has said no crime was committed in the disclosure of Plame’s identity. Why force Libby to keep the lawyer’s billing meter ticking?
According to a new book by two Washington Post reporters, when Robert Novak disclosed in July 2003 that Plame worked for the CIA, Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, realized he had been Novak’s source. He told Powell, and later the FBI. The State Department’s lawyer, William Howard Taft IV, then told the Justice Department. Taft told then-White House counsel Albert Gonzales that State had shared “information” with Justice and asked if Gonzalez wanted to know more. Gonzalez, unbelievably, said no, leaving the president to look stupid.
Special prosecutors find out everything Justice knows when they come on board. Fitzgerald, then, knew all along who had disclosed Plame’s name but badgered Libby and White House adviser Karl Rove for months, feeding the malice of the Bush haters who kept snarling about a White House conspiracy - now revealed as a fairy tale - to “out” a CIA agent, and clapping New York Times reporter Judith Miller in jail to boot for refusing to talk about her sources.
Powell, Armitage and Taft have left the government and can’t be disciplined. But their disgrace is clear.
http://news.bostonherald.com/editorial/view.bg?articleid=155683How Obtuse Is the U.S. Press?
How Obtuse Is the U.S. Press?
By Robert Parry
September 3, 2006
In the movie “Shawshank Redemption,” the wrongly convicted Andy Dufrense (Tim Robbins) gets frustrated when the corrupt prison warden blocks Dufrense’s chance to prove his innocence. “How can you be so obtuse?” Dufrense asks.
The same question could be addressed today to Washington journalists who are falling over themselves to absolve George W. Bush’s White House of any serious wrongdoing in the three-year-old assault on former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson and the outing of his CIA officer wife, Valerie Plame.
Snip...
That account from Novak clashes with the version cited by the Washington Post editorial of Sept. 1, 2006, which describes the Plame disclosure as reportedly passed along “in an offhand manner, virtually as gossip.” Novak’s account to Newsday only a week after his infamous column would seem to fit better with a scenario in which Bush’s aides had prepped Novak on what to ask Armitage or in which Armitage was part of the anti-Wilson cabal.
Snip...
In other words, though Bush knew a great deal about how the anti-Wilson scheme got started – since he was involved in starting it – he uttered misleading public statements to conceal the White House role and possibly to signal to others that they should follow suit in denying knowledge.
Partial Exposure
The cover-up might have worked, except in late 2003, Ashcroft recused himself because of a conflict of interest, and Fitzgerald – the U.S. Attorney in Chicago – was named as the special prosecutor. Fitzgerald pursued the investigation far more aggressively, even coercing journalists to testify about the White House leaks.
more...
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/090206.html Smearing Joe Wilson, Again
by ROBERT PARRY
The Washington Post’s editorial makes excuses for the government deceivers, treats their exposure of the CIA officer as justifiable – and attacks Joe Wilson by recycling the government’s false spin points against him.In a world that wasn’t upside-down, the editorial page of Washington’s biggest newspaper might praise a whistleblower like former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for alerting the American people to a government deception that helped lead the country into a disastrous war that has killed 2,627 U.S. soldiers.
The editorial page also might demand that every senior administration officials who sought to protect that deception by leaking the identity of a covert CIA officer (Wilson’s wife) be held accountable, at minimum stripped of their security clearances and fired from government.
But the United States, circa 2006, is an upside-down world. So the Washington Post’s editorial page instead makes excuses for the government deceivers, treats their exposure of the CIA officer as justifiable – and attacks the whistleblower by recycling the government’s false spin points against him.
If future historians wonder how the United States could have blundered so catastrophically into Iraq under false pretenses and why so few establishment figures dared to speak out, the historians might read the sorry pattern of the Post’s editorial-page attacks on those who did dissent.
Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, who fell for virtually every Iraq War deception that the Bush administration could dream up, is back assaulting former Ambassador Wilson, again, in a Sept. 1 editorial, falsely accusing Wilson of lying and concluding that “it’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.”
more...
http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2006/090106Parry.shtmlMissing the Point on CIA Leak Case
By Brent Budowsky
August 31, 2006
Editor's Note: The U.S. news media -- and conservative pundits -- are seeing vindication for the White House in the disclosure that former State Department official Richard Armitage may have been the first official to blurt out Valerie Plame's CIA identity to a reporter. After all, they say, Armitage was not an Iraq War hawk and apparently was not part of any cabal to willfully leak Plame's identity to the news media as a way to undercut her war-critic husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
But this overriding fact remains: other administration officials were intentionally passing on word about Plame's undercover CIA role. The likes of White House aides Lewis Libby and Karl Rove were peddling Plame's identity to some half dozen journalists under the guidance of Vice President Dick Cheney, who was livid when Wilson challenged the White House case for war with Iraq. There's also the question of why political adviser Rove was given access to the sensitive information about Plame; he had no legitimate "need to know."
In this guest essay, political analyst Brent Budowsky argues that the Armitage angle in the Plame case is just the latest diversion from the treachery and corrupt partisanship that implicates some of the top officials in George W. Bush's White House:With the latest "news" on this case, several points should be clearly understood at the outset. First, Dick Armitage's role was widely and publicly discussed as early as March, and second, Dick Armitage clearly screwed up but was NOT the primary source of the leak. While he does share moral culpability, the driving force behind the leak came from the neocon and partisan wings of the White House.
It is their spin, and nothing more, to try to defend themselves by shifting blame to the anti-Iraq war Armitage, and to the anti-Iraq war State Department, who they believe "needs an American desk." If Armitage never existed the leaks would have happened exactly the same way. If the White House-neocon axis never existed the leaks would never have happened. Whatever the shortcomings of Armitage and State, the real culpability for the identity disclosures reside elsewhere and progressives should be very careful to avoid unknowingly pushing the neocon line.
Snip...
This business about leaking identities is not only about partisan and political vendettas. It is about how and when we go to war, how and when we should not go to war, and why it is so fundamentally important that intelligence should be based on facts and truth, and not twisted and distorted for the ideology of going to war, or the partisanship of exploiting war.
What went wrong in Iraq, is that the democratic process of making the decision to wage war was corrupted and warped from the beginning.
Snip...
In my view, whatever the legalities, there is a special place in hell on this issue for Bob Novak, who named the name, and for the Washington Post Editorial Page, which then published the name, and for Bob Woodward, who attacked the prosecutor without disclosing to his readers or the nation his private interest in the case. Though I will give Woodward credit for this: he never published the Plame story, and neither did Judy Miller, by the way.
more...
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/083006b.html
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