The Right is in full bore denial mode. Recently neocon soul mate to Dick Cheney one Scotter Libby was convicted of,
Count 1 – Obstruction of Justice: Libby intentionally deceived the grand jury about how he learned, and “disclosed to the media,” information about Valerie Plame Wilson’s employment by the CIA.
Count 2 – Making a False Statement: Libby intentionally gave FBI agents false information about a conversation he had with NBC’s Tim Russert regarding Valerie Plame Wilson, who is married to Joseph Wilson.Count 4 – Perjury: Libby knowingly provided false testimony in court about a conversation he had with Russert.
Count 5 – Perjury: Libby knowingly provided false testimony in court about his conversation with reporters regarding Valerie Plame Wilson’s CIA employment.
Plame was undercover, we knew that even before her testimony today. We also know that notes written by Cheney revealed he directed the effort to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Libby later came to her seat in the back of the plane, holding a handwritten card with notes he said were Cheney’s instructions about what to say to Cooper. Libby told her, Martin testified, that Cheney, in a rare move, authorized him to provide a specific quote on the record, with Libby’s name attached.
Republican apologists Andrew C. McCarthy wrote at the intellectual flagship of conservatism the National Review, July 18, 2005, 8:01 a.m. Did the CIA “Out” Valerie Plame?
The hypocrisy, though, only starts there. It turns out that the media believe Plame was outed long before either Novak or Corn took pen to paper. And not by an ambiguous confirmation from Rove or a nod-and-a-wink from Ambassador Hubby. No, the media think Plame was previously compromised by a disclosure from the intelligence community itself — although it may be questionable whether there was anything of her covert status left to salvage at that point, for reasons that will become clear momentarily.
McCarthy isn’t the only one to stick to this bizarre narrative that reads more like a bad spy thriller then anything resembling reality. Imagine that Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was able to convince the judge and a grand jury that none of this Cuba-CIA outing ever happened – at the very least the judge would have noticed. Where are the indictments for Fitzgerald and his staff for this dastardly plot to keep this compelling Cuba evidence out of the proceedings – and even more important is why didn’t Libby’s lawyers introduce it into evidence, the whole trial would have gone away. Then they have to explain away Bush appointee and team player ( he lied for his boss) CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden’s assertion that Valerie Plame was covert. Is General Hayden lying again. If the right-wing blogs want to stick with their surreal version of events, well it is their tradition to make fools of themselves. Since they hate Valerie Plame so much they could then also see about charging her for lying in her Congressional testimony today. Or it could be that Hayden’s telling the truth for once and Plame continues to make the administration and the Right look like traitors in the continuing Republican tradition of putting their rabid ideology before their loyalty to country.
White House Security Chief Reveals — No Probe of Plame Leak There
NEW YORK Dr. James Knodell, director of the Office of Security at the White House, told a congressional committee today that he was aware of no internal investigation or report into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame.
[ ]…Knodell testified that those who had participated in the leaking of classified information were required to own up to this and he was not aware that anyone, including Karl Rove, had done that.
A right-wing blogger named Macsmind is on the case, rather then somehow drag in President Clinton he has chosen the irrefutable path of right-wing deductive reasoning so stand back and wait to be amazed by his Sherlock Holmes impression, Posted by Macranger on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 7:12 pm.
Ok, let’s let this sink in. The White House has no inherant ability to “probe itself” and in fact as soon as they became the “focus” they had to recuse themselves.
Besides Knodell’s testimony there is one inconvenient fact that the Macster left out. Novak’s column appeared months before Fitzgerald’s investigation began. So if their was some need legal or otherwise for the Whitehouse to stop any internal probe, they could have continued that internal fact finding up until the beginning of the investigation by the special prosecutor. Nothing , legal or otherwise would have stopped Bush from asking questions of his staff purely on ethical grounds. An ethical president would have strolled down the hall and asked Dick and Scooter what they knew and when they knew it and who they told- unless of course Bush already knew or didn’t care. Mac and his cohorts should loosen the foil its cutting off circulation. Bush assured the public that this was all serious – it can’t be serious if no laws were broken or ethics were violated. That he would get to the bottom of the matter. Apparently GW immediately turned around went back to the Oval office and sit on his hands, Bush Should Live Up to 2000 Pledge
Given the opportunity on Monday to reassure the public that he meant all of those things he said back in 2000 during the campaign and specifically what he said in June 2004 about the Plame scandal, the president punted.
“There’s a serious investigation,” Bush said when asked by reporters during a White House photo-op with the Bulgarian prime minister. “I’m not going to prejudge the outcome of the investigation.”
But Bush wasn’t being asked by the press to “prejudge” the outcome. He was, essentially, being asked to define his standard of propriety. Does someone have to be indicted and convicted of a specific crime in the Plame case to deserve dismissal from Bush’s staff? Or does a person merely have to have engaged in questionable, or possibly unethical, behavior?
The investigation into the Plame leak raises plenty of questions that the president may eventually be forced to answer. Among the biggest is what exactly have Rove and Libby told Bush about their roles in the leak?
Murray Waas raised just this question in a National Journal story earlier this month, writing:
“White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove personally assured President Bush in the early fall of 2003 that he had not disclosed to anyone in the press that Valerie Plame, the wife of an administration critic, was a CIA employee, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the accounts that both Rove and Bush independently provided to federal prosecutors.
“During the same conversation in the White House two years ago — occurring just days after the Justice Department launched a criminal probe into the unmasking of Plame as a covert agency operative — Rove also assured the president that he had not leaked any information to the media in an effort to discredit Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson. Rove also did not tell the president about his July 2003 a phone call with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, a conversation that touched on the issue of Wilson and Plame.”
If reports such as those are true, Rove clearly misled the president about his role. And to make matters worse, the White House wittingly or unwittingly played along, in the form of White House spokesman Scott McClellan’s denials two years ago that anyone in the administration had anything to do with the Plame leak.
Scotty assured us that no one in the WH knew anything. Libby is indicted and convicted. The jury says that Libby was just a front man and asked where Cheney and Rove are. Libby lied for a reason. People generally do not lie for the pure pleasure of serving jail time. He lied to protect law breakers in the Whitehouse. Libby wasn’t convicted because he’s a dufus with a poor memory and even if that were the case his lawyers had the time and power of discovery to refresh his memory. Scooter lied because up and down the halls of the Bush WH people were telling tales, getting their little smear campaign off the ground. They knew that Plame didn’t have the authority – official power to send ambassadors off on fishing expeditions – that was just another red herring Cheney and Rove fed to any right-wing pundit that was willing to repeat it – and there have been plenty. Even after Libby’s conviction – which would not have even been possible if Plame were not covert – the right is still claiming that she wasn’t – the Right has their little pinkies stuck in their ears and they’re huffing and puffing about more then anything else reality intruding on the carefully crafted faerie tale that is still rattling around in their heads with bits of Cuban-Russian conspiracy fantasies and tin foil laced with carefully altered time lines of who said what first. Anyone interested in the truth can easily punch gaping holes through all their delusional ranting, but the point is to feed some pablum to the other Holocaust-like Plame deniers of the fringe Right. Why is all of this so important to them. Because it turns out that they of the wrap their crap in the flag crowd have been themselves found guilty of the kind of betrayal that they accuse liberals of everyday. The Right continues to eat a lot of crow and that crow buffet is unlikely to end anytime soon with a Democratic majority all too ready to investigate the games Bush and the Right are playing with America’s security, Valerie Plame Wilson asserted that she was in fact a covert officer at the time that columnist Robert Novak revealed her employment at the CIA.
Washington Post editorial: “The trial has provided…no evidence that she was, in fact, covert.” [Washingotn Post, 3/7/07]
Mort Kondracke: “I frankly don’t think since Valerie Plame was not a covert officer that there was a crime here.” [Fox, 3/9/07]
Sean Hannity: “She did not meet the criteria, in any way, shape, matter or form as a covert agent.” [Fox, 3/6/07]
Robert Novak: “No evidence that she was a covert agent was ever presented to the jury.” [Fox, 3/6/07]
Brit Hume: “Whether the woman was covert, Valerie Plame was covert within the meaning of the law, remains at this point, still unclear. Unlikely she was.” [Fox, 3/6/07]
Victoria Toensing: “Plame was not covert. She worked at CIA headquarters and had not been stationed abroad within five years of the date of Novak’s column.” [Washington Post, 2/18/07]
“…In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him–all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination–you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”
From the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
updated 03-18-07 for grammar and clarity.
The Long Goodbye 