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Gandalf Grey · Guest

Scooter Libby, Fall Guy

By Rory O'Connor
Created Mar 7 2007 - 9:36am

"It was said a number of times, what are we doing with this guy here?" Denis
Collins recalled his fellow jurors asking, as he spoke to the press
immediately following the pronouncement that Scooter Libby was guilty on
four of five felony counts. "Where's Rove? Where are these other guys?

"I'm not saying we didn't think Mr. Libby was guilty of the things we found
him guilty of," Collins added. "It seemed like he was, as Mr. Wells put it,
he was the fall guy."

Collins is correct: it WAS Libby's own lead defense attorney Ted Wells who
had claimed weeks ago in his opening statement that his client was being
made a scapegoat to protect key White House political operative Karl Rove,
so as not to endanger President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign. It was
good that the jury reminded us - and also good that they paid such attention
to detail, undertook such painstaking analysis of the evidence and
ultimately came to the correct conclusion. But most of all it was good that
they were still asking those many unanswered questions.

But before the rest of us join in the jurors' "tremendous amount of sympathy
for Mr. Libby," let's remember that the sword Libby has fallen on to protect
his higher-ups will likely yet prove to be a blunt one.

After the verdict was announced, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said,
"It's about time someone in the Bush administration has been held
accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war
critics." I agree. But is that really what has just happened? I think not -
although ample evidence exists of such a campaign, the Libby trial was
obviously (and properly) much more narrow in its scope, as both Judge Reggie
B. Walton and chief prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald rightly kept the focus on
the issue before them of whether or not Libby had lied and obstructed
justice.

And it's certainly true that the Libby trial "revealed deeper truths about
Vice President Cheney's role in this sordid affair," as Reid concluded. But
the likelihood that President Bush will act on Reid's suggestion and "pledge
not to pardon Libby for his criminal conduct" is so low as to be laughable.
Ted Wells says he will submit a motion for a new trial, and that if that
motion is denied, he will appeal. But Libby's Presidential pardon is due to
arrive sometime in January -- long before his guilty verdict will ever be
overturned on appeal.

Libby, of course, is the only person ever indicted after a multi-year
investigation which ultimately reached deep inside the White House. The
central issue in that investigation revolved around allegations that someone
within that White House illegally disclosed classified information during
the late spring and early summer of 2003, when it was revealed that
Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had criticized the Iraq policy, was married to
an undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame.

No one was ever charged with the leak -- which turned out to have emanated
originally not from the White House but from the State Department in the
person of Richard Armitage -- but the results of the investigation
nonetheless involved both the administration and the lapdog Washington press
corps, and told us much about the top-level nexus of Big Politics and Big
Media, "casting a harsh light on the way power and information flows in
Washington," as the Washington Post put it, "the uneasy symbiosis between an
elite tier of Washington journalists and their confidential sources inside
the government."

In particular, the trial demonstrated conclusively that Scooter Libby's
boss -- Vice President Cheney -- was far more involved in the campaign
against Joseph Wilson than had previously been apparent. The prosecution
showed that the vice president dictated specific talking points he wanted
Libby and others to use to against Wilson, helped select journalists to talk
to, and even had the president declassify secret intelligence reports to
undercut Wilson's criticism.

"There is a cloud over what the vice president did," Fitzgerald told jurors
in his closing argument. "That's not something we put there. That cloud is
not something you can pretend is not there."

The fact is that this is the first trial of the criminal Bush/Cheney Iraq
war - and unless Scooter is taken care of, it won't be the last. That's why
the pardon is a certainty. If the sword Libby falls on doesn't prove to be
blunt, it could well reveal a double-edge -- and there's no telling who
might then be cut, or how deep those cuts would be.
_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson