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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (222710)	3/6/2007 5:10:07 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Chris Matthews reacts to Libby verdict Posted: Tuesday, March 06, 2007 12:22 PM by Hardball hardblogger.msnbc.msn.com Why were Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff Scooter Libby so intent on avoiding responsibility for Joseph Wilson’s 2002 trip to Africa? The trial heard sworn testimony from several witnesses that it was the Vice President’s inquiry that triggered the CIA trip. So, in the words of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, what was all the “hullabaloo” when Joe Wilson wrote in the New York Times that it was “the vice president’s office” that had raised the question with the CIA of a possible Saddam Hussein effort to buy uranium from Niger? Why did Cheney and Libby want everybody to think it wasn’t the vice president?” Why did Cheney’s chief of staff call and complain so fatefully when Wilson’s claims were repeated on “Hardball?” Could it be that Cheney feared that if the country knew it was his inquiry that led to the Africa trip then he, the president’s right-hand man, could be expected to have gotten a full report on the trip’s findings. In that case, Cheney would have known a year ahead of time that there was no deal by Saddam Hussein to buy uranium yellowcake in Niger. He should therefore have kept the president from making that assertion in his 2003 State of the Union that “British intelligence” reported a Saddam effort to buy uranium from Africa. That assertion of a nuclear threat from Iraq is what tilted this country toward war. I asked George Tennet, the CIA director, to explain why the vice president never got a report on a CIA fact-finding trip that was triggered by his inquiry. Tennet’s reply was “Ask him!”

To: geode00 who wrote (222710)	3/6/2007 5:22:52 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Andrew Sullivan seems to have summarized the lesson of the day quite nicely: Something is rotten in the heart of Washington; and it lies in the vice-president’s office. The salience of this case is obvious. What it is really about - what it has always been about - is whether this administration deliberately misled the American people about WMD intelligence before the war. The risks Cheney took to attack Wilson, the insane over-reaction that otherwise very smart men in this administration engaged in to rebut a relatively trivial issue: all this strongly implies the fact they were terrified that the full details of their pre-war WMD knowledge would come out. Fitzgerald could smell this. He was right to pursue it, and to prove that a brilliant, intelligent, sane man like Libby would risk jail to protect his bosses. What was he really trying to hide? We now need a Congressional investigation to find out more, to subpoena Cheney and, if he won’t cooperate, consider impeaching him. About a month ago, Kevin Drum noted one of those points that everyone seems to understand implicitly, but few have bothered to articulate: Fitzgerald talked to a lot of White House and administration staffers as part of this investigation, and Libby was apparently the only one to lie. Richard Armitage originally leaked Plame’s name to Novak, and even he didn’t try to lie. Libby, however, lied repeatedly, under oath, to the FBI, Fitzgerald, and the grand jury. “What was different about the vice president’s office that out of the entire mountain of people Fitzgerald interviewed, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff was the only one who felt he had to lie?” Kevin asked. The answer, I suspect, gets back to what Sullivan said: “Something is rotten in the heart of Washington; and it lies in the vice-president’s office.” It’s hardly a stretch to put two and two together here. Libby almost certainly lied because he knew what his colleagues didn’t: that Cheney told Libby about Plame. Libby had to push some bizarre story about learning about Plame from Tim Russert - almost certainly because he couldn’t acknowledge his original source. As Ezra noted, Libby’s convictions — obstructing justice, providing a false statement, and two counts of perjury — are “protective crimes — they serve to protect others higher in the food chain.” And considering Libby’s role in the White House, that means Cheney. Kevin explained the likely chain of events. For some reason, in May 2003 Cheney went ballistic over a couple of anonymous statements Joe Wilson made to Nick Kristof and Walter Pincus, statements that weren’t especially damaging to Cheney and could have been challenged pretty easily. It’s hard to say why … but the end result was that Cheney ferreted out Plame’s identity, passed it along to Libby, and told him to put a full-court press on Wilson. Libby thought it was worth lying about this because it threatened to provide a clue to just how involved Cheney had been in spinning the prewar intelligence on Iraqi nukes. That was the one thing serious enough to make them wildly overreact to a couple of otherwise toothless allegations. Libby deserves his convictions. The only unfair thing about the whole trial is that his boss, the guy who was behind the whole thing, wasn’t in the dock with him. And it’s not too late. Maybe Libby will wake up and realize there’s no point in taking the fall for his boss. Maybe Congress will explore this in high-profile hearings and expose the larger scandal. Either way, Cheney has solidified his legacy — as a cancer on Bush’s presidency.