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

[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.