Libby Fought the Law and the Law Won

Well, okay, the law actually hasn't won anything yet. An indictment is more an announcement - "Hey, guy, I intend to prosecute you" - than anything else. And so far the guy has only been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Serious crimes, particularly when they concern top government officials who are obstructing a federal prosectuor's investigation. Not quite as serious as Tom DeLay's Tony Soprano-esque racketeering charge. But, hey, you take what you can get.

I'm just delighted this weekend by all the denial and hand-wringing by conservative pundits. These guys have had it too good for too long...They have no idea how to deal with having their backs against the ropes, with having to actually explain themselves to a country that no longer quite fancies their exquisite blend of gay-bashing, Jesus-loving, Bush-worshipping, torture-celebrating and civil rights-hating balderdash.

Take Andrew Sullivan, a guy who was fiercely in favor of the war and of President Bush until it stopped going well, at which time he turned on the President but continued supporting the war. It seems fair enough to me. In 2003, he was gullible. In 2004, he figured shit out. No harm, no foul.

So why is he still defending the President and his bullshit cabal or cronies and whackjob advisors? He published this piffle TODAY:

Some context is important here.

NOTE: Any time you see a guy attempting to give Plamegate some "context," it means he's going to blow smoke up your ass about how it's no big deal. This is a lie. Ignore it.

I have yet to be even nearly convinced that Plamegate reveals some massive conspiracy to deceive the public in advance about the rationale for the Iraq war.

Okay, Andrew, then allow me to explain it to you...Valerie Plame's name was leaked in order to smear Joe Wilson, her husband. He had just stated to the national media that one of the main reasons our government went to war with Iraq, the notion they were buying uranium from Niger, was untrue. To make it look like his trip was nothing more than nepotism and to discredit his eventual findings. Also, I think it has the added intentional consequence of emasculating him, of presenting him as a weak man beholden to a more powerful wife. (It's the same game right-wingers used to play with Bil Clinton, portraying him as a wuss deferring constantly to some shrill harpy).

How is that not an attempt to deceive the public about the rationale for war? OF COURSE IT IS! A guy came back and made a true statement, that Iraq wasn't buying yellowcake uranium, that inf act Iraq didn't have any WMD's at all. We now know 100% that this is true. And these leakers decided to actively discredit the man, to defend their lie. That's textbook definition of deception.

Notice that Andrew says in advance. That's the crux of his whole argument.

It looks far more likely to me that in 2002, Cheney and Libby were intent on insuring that the CIA was not complacent, and that they weren't blindsided by Saddam's WMD program this time the way they were in 1990. I'm grateful for their aggressive attempt to make sure they didn't ignore threats to this country in the aftermath of 9/11. And they'd now be crucified if a Saddam-made bio weapon had gone off in the U.S. on their watch.

Try to wrap your mind around this one (I know it's hard)...Andrew's saying that he's thankful Dick Cheney and Libby put pressure on the CIA, to make sure they weren't "complacent." But that's not what they were doing. It's not like Cheney called the CIA every once in a while to check up on them, make sure they were doing a solid job. He set up his own intelligence office, he monitored their every activity, he used inside contacts to work against agents pursuing alternate theories on Iraq that didn't satisfy his lust for war. That's what the entire intelligence community has been saying for 2 years now! Why is Andrew going to continue to deny deny deny to protect this government? As a gay guy who claims to have voted for Kerry, what does he stand to gain?

Also, he does that thing where he pretends Saddam had access to some kind of weapon. "What if Saddam blew up Los Angeles? You'd all be really pissed if the president hadn't done anything!"

But Saddam had no big weapons! We know that's true! It would be like saying ,"George Bush had no choice but to strangle those third-graders with his bare hands...What if one of them had grown up and raped your wife? Wouldn't you be angry that the president hadn't killed that rapist when he was still a kid?"

What seems more likely to me is that in the aftermath of the war, when their claims largely evaporated, they found it hard to deal with the humiliation. So they over-reached in trying to smear their critics, in the Wilson case, almost certainly violating the law. That's serious, and it may be a sub-conspiracy.

Who cares when they lied? They didn't need to leak information about Joe Wilson before the war began...No one knew who the fuck he was. But what this story indicates is the MO of the White House, suppressing any intelligence information that didn't support their case for war, fighting anyone who disagreed with their aggressive, cowboy tactics and, finally, entering into a war on evidence they knew was questionable.

But regardless of any of that, it's still a crime to leak governmental information in order to smear someone who's telling the truth in the New York Times. Right? Does it matter if it happened in 2001, 2002 or 2003?

(I have to say I find it entirely credible - though we have no evidence as yet - that Cheney was fully aware of the illegal leak and encouraged it.) But criminality and conspiracy in reaction to post-invasion humiliation is not the same thing as criminality and conspiracy before the war. The anti-war left's attempt to conflate the two has, as yet, little substance. That's worth keeping in mind.

Are you fucking kidding me, Andrew? Surely you know better than this. Surely you know that the law is the law regardless of your motives in violating it. "Oh, they only leaked that CIA agent's name and then lied about it because they were embarrassed! Come on, you guys, it's kind of adorable, actually."

Even his last sentence is wrong. Nothing about his post is worth keeping in mind.

And that's not even getting into Bob Woodward on Larry King yesterday. I didn't watch the show myself, as Larry King's suspenders and voice kind of creep me out, but thankfully RJ Escow at Huffington Post has blogged it out for me.

First of all this began not as somebody launching a smear campaign ... I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started as a kind of gossip, as chatter and that somebody learned (Plame) had worked at the CIA and helped him get this job ...

So, let me run this one by you, Bobby...Do Washington politicos, journalists, CIA agents and high-ranking administrative officials tool around DC all day gossiping about people working undercover? Is that the make-up of typical DC chatter. Because, if so, that's a big story. You should probably write something about how compromised our entire intelligence system has been by gossip and chatter.

But I'm guessing it's just complete and utter bullshit. That's Woodward's reporting style these days - make strange statements that are so vague, it's impossible to even discuss them at length.

There's a lot of innocent actions in all of this but ... this is a junkyard dog prosecutor ...

Special Prosecuter Fitzgerald strikes me as a wholly upright, honest and professional kind of guy. Almost an Elliott Ness figure. The exact opposite of a right-wing scumbag like, say, Kenneth Starr (bearing in mind that Fitzgerald was a Republican appointee). I can't think of a less accurate way to describe him than as a "junkyard dog." I mean, he doesn't wear a big steel chain around his neck, and I've never once seen him hanging out with Hulk Hogan.

Some people kind of had convenient memories before the grand jury. “Technically” they might be able to be charged with perjury. But I don't see an underlying crime here.

Bob Woodward is one of the two reporters responsible for the Watergate investigation. He's fucking Robert Redford in All the President's Men for Christ's sake. Can you imagine Redford in that movie spouting this tripe? "I mean, yeah, perjury's technically against the law, but it's a small, unimportant crime. I mean, come on, people, the president and his crew seem like a bunch of nice guys, right? Let's just leave 'em alone."

(Wilson) came back (from Niger) and reported and Michael (Isikoff, a co-panelist) and others who have read the Senate Intelligence Committee on this know his report was very ambiguous.

If it was such an ambiguous report, if no one took it seriously and it didn't have an impact on our efforts in Iraq, why the elongated effort to smear the guy? Why did any of this happen? Oh, right, it didn't...There was no leak...Just some innocent gossip...I forgot, Bob, sorry.

Also, the fact that we now know that what Wilson claimed was true, and that Iraq was nowhere capable of constructing WMD's and had no direct interest in buying Niger's yellowcake uranium, how can he still argue the report was ambiguous? I believe the word you're searching for, Bob, is "true."

They did a damage assessment within the CIA, looking at what this did that Joe Wilson's wife was outed. And turned out it was quite minimal damage. They did not have to pull anyone out undercover abroad. They didn't have to resettle anyone. There was no physical danger of any kind and there was just some embarrassment.

And this, we know now via Eschaton, is a total lie. There was no damage assessment done at the CIA over how they'd be affected by the Valerie Plame unmasking. At least, according to today's Washington Post:

The CIA has not conducted a formal damage assessment, as is routinely done in cases of espionage and after any legal proceedings have been exhausted.

Oops, Bob, you did even worst than Scooter Libby. Your lie about a possible government leak of information was exposed less than 24 hours later. Try to work on that next time you're out bullshitting the American people on behalf of your buddies in high places.