and another thing

[topaz]

This is at least partly related to spending the evening watching a Michael Moore movie, but I am so fucking angry about the Scooter Libby business I can't see straight.  Holy hell am I mad.  I could just about eat a battleship and shit staples.

I think one of the things that's most infuriating is that we have such a gutless, spineless, Democratic leadership in Congress, it's practically guaranteed that nothing is going to happen.  Pelosi's chair was barely warm before she announced that impeachment was off the table.  (The Huffington Post is urging you to make her put it back on the table.  That number is 202-225-0100, folks.  And MoveOn has one of their endless petitions in play to support impeachment, if you like signing MoveOn petitions.)

Our House rep, Marty Meehan, is vacating his seat this fall and it's up for grabs.  The first candidate who says they support impeaching this motherfucker will get my vote.  For that matter, they may well get me to quit my job and go to work on their campaign.

Comments

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

I think Bush (and Cheney) should be impeached and removed from office, but the Scooter Libby affair isn't going to be the thing that hangs them. (People's anger on this kind of baffles me: Libby wasn't charged with leaking Valerie Plame's name, and what he was charged with, well, if you didn't learn the term perjury trap when Bill Clinton was impeached, read over this (http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1169&context=lawfaculty) and then look at the things Libby was actually charged with and tell me what you think.


However, there is something Bush and Cheney could be impeached on, which I don't think they'll be able to defend themselves from: not hitting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's HQ (http://www.slate.com/id/2108880/) in 2003. We had Colin Powell going in front of the world, mentioning someone who was already a big concern, showing that we knew where his HQ was, and then we didn't attack it for over 50 days!

The best face you can put on this is massive incompetence. The worst face, and the one I think is most credible, is that they decided not to hit Zarqawi because that would have undermined the case for invading Iraq.

Zarqawi was long gone by the time the attack on the place Powell mentioned happened, and he went on to be a major factor in the Iraqi horror show, laying out a master plan (http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2004/03/strategic_insig.html) that has mostly been achieved. He was responsible for thousands of deaths, was almost certainly the guy who murdered Nick Berg, and it took a lot of time and money to hunt him down.

Now, it wasn't certain that he would have been killed if his hangout was raided, but the way they waited still makes my blood boil, and the thought that they probably delayed for BS reasons makes me wish that an impeachment trial could give life sentences, to be served in Abu Ghraib.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to carry on this discussion in two journals at once, so suffice it to say here that I think you have radically misunderstood the meaning of "perjury trap."

I'm also sort of dumbfounded that you think systematically interfering with a legal investigation and attempting to circumvent the checks and balances on the executive system are not impeachable offenses, but that waging a war on foreign soil in an incompetent manner is. I think this points up your personal obsession with foreign policy more than anything else.

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

I don't think they waged war in an incompetent manner. That by itself, while bad, doesn't strike me as impeachable.

What I think they did was decided that going after Zarqawi would undermine the case for invading Iraq, so they left him alone, which meant, when they discussed Khurmal in public, he had a lot of advance warning and skedaddled.

You're missing another obsession of mine: the way prosecutors abuse their powers. I think it's bad that people can be indicted for "lying to federal officials," for instance, especially since if there isn't a recording of the conversation, the federal officials are always assumed to be telling the truth, and "lying" is construed very broadly (http://library.findlaw.com/2004/May/11/147945.html). I think the way modern grand juries are run, especially when they are used to come up with things to charge people with, is wrong. (This is why I agree with the people who want grand juries abolished (http://www.nacdl.org/public.nsf/freeform/grandjuryreform?opendocument).)

I've also read the supposedly damning bits in Libby's testimony, and it looks to me like he got confused about dates of when he talked the subject with Cheney, and Fitzgerald decided that was deliberate. I think it's entirely possible for a smart person to forget details, and get flustered, especially in front of a grand jury, where you can't consult with your attorney or, often, your notes on the matter. I know I personally would have a hard time in that situation.

While I want Bush to be removed, I'm not all that enthused by a case against one of his subordinates that, to my non-lawyer mind, looks an awful lot like it could have been mounted against anyone testifying, if the prosecutor had decided mistakes in their testimony were lies.

I mean, really, what has been the end result of this investigation? We've found that the leak was accidental, one man was indicted on charges that prosecutors generally bring when they can't think of anything else and want to make a failed investigation look fruitful, and two reporters were slung in jail until they squealed, and when they did talk, we didn't find out anything pertinent to what the investigation was supposed to be about in the first place.

It's made me reconsider my opinion on Fitzgerald quite a bit. I still think he's probably one of the best prosecutors around, but I now think he's got a bit of Inspector Javert in him.

[unzeugmatic.livejournal.com]

I mean, really, what has been the end result of this investigation?

We learned that many high government officials associated with the office of the vice president -- including Scooter Libby -- tried on many occasions to identify Valerie Plame to at least four different reporters. We learned that the office of the vice-president was extremely concerned with Joseph Wilson from the time of Paul Krugman's initial column about his claims, which he later made explicit in his own op-ed. We basically got a whole lot of testimony that pretty directly points to Dick Cheney as the original source of the publicizing of Valerie Plame's name as a CIA operative, among the people who then passed that information along although not specifically for the purpose of blowing her cover. All of these are things that had been explicitly and constantly denied by the administration and its minions.

We also learned, in related Congressional testimony, that the White House itself, despite its public statements, never made any attempt of its own to investigate this incident. You seem to be saying that there really was no need to investigate this incident at all. The CIA disagrees.

In short: The CIA wanted to know where the trail led -- they already knew that Dick Armitage was one of Novak's two sources, but why had the status of a covert agent been so bandied about that this knowledge became common in this circle, among individuals who had no authority to know this? The investigation did answer this, but not to the extent that would support a likely conviction. Had Scooter Libby not lied about how this whole chain of information and disinformation came about, there might have been a legally supportable response here.

You don't think that Libby's lies were deliberate -- or even that they were lies. And yet a jury deliberating the testimony found sufficient reason to believe that the nature of Libby's testimony was not credible when considered in conjunction with the other testimony. Also, it's not just the dates at issue here -- it's where he first learned of Valerie Plame, which, given his participation in the publicizing of her name, is a big deal and not the sort of thing he'd be likely to not just forget but to misremember. The judge agreed with the jury. I find your contention that Libby simply got flustered in the presence of a grand jury to be ludicrous and inconsistent with not just everything we know about Scooter Libby and his legal background but with the circumstances surrounding the events about which he testified.

Fitzgerald was tasked with finding out how the name of a covert agent reached the point where administration officials were dropping this tidbit into the inboxes of several reporaters -- and whether that in itself was a crime, according to the relevant statutes. Reporter testimony was key to this. He got pretty far -- he got far enough that anybody willing to look at the testimony now has a much clearer idea of how this all came about.

The issue for me -- and this is completely just one of those "sense of" things -- is that I really don't think the point of leaking Valerie Plame's name was specifically to out her as a covert agent. That would make no sense to me. Her covert status got lost in the shuffle -- it seems through what you might even describe as carelessness on the part of the Vice President and probably others, who weren't protective of information that should have known to protect. But that, apparently, is not illegal, without the specific intention of revealing her status.

[sine.livejournal.com]

iirc, perjury trap is when you put someone under oath and ask embarrassing questions about irrelevant, legal activities (do you pick your nose? do you cheat on your wife?), stuff people often do but are ashamed to admit to. it doesn't involve asking someone questions about possible illegal behavior, does it?