Libby Trial - Should Be Interesting

[Rick Lee]

Armitage did not fess up until long after Bush made those statements. And Bush was not the first, second or even third person to hear Armitage's confession.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by JSDSKI
There is a lot more to this "inside the beltway" disinformation compaign than has been released so far - interesting information forthcoming during this trial. In point of fact:

(1) CIA has confirmed Plame's undercover status.
(2) Armitage was not the only leaker.
(3) Reporters will testify that Libby gave them the name.
(4) Libby may have leaked the Plame story to reporters (who subsequently refused to testify) before Armitage leaked it.
(5) The "who leaked what when" is all about pushing bad Iraq intel blame between two primary players: CIA v Cheney Ofc.

It's not quite as black and white as some would have us believe.

The Cheney office was the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, set up specifically to cherry pick and "analyze" intelligence prior to it's release to congress and to certain people at the White House that were otherwise "out of the loop."

[fastpat]

More on what's really happening in the trial of Scooter Libby.

January 24, 2007
The Trial of Dick Cheney
Scooter's in the dock – but his boss is the one being accused
by Justin Raimondo

The opening statements in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby struck official Washington like twin thunderbolts, opening up a huge fissure in the Bush administration at the same time that everything else – the security situation in Iraq, the Republican Party, the president's approval rating – is falling apart at the seams. With Scooter under fire from federal prosecutors and caught in a furious fusillade of mutual recriminations, what it all augurs is the final collapse of the War Party.

The defense fired off its big guns on the first day, with Libby's lawyer, Ted Wells, rebutting Patrick J. Fitzgerald's contention that Libby had a motive to lie because the president had declared that anyone who leaked would be fired. (I note here that I'm citing not the "mainstream" media's account of the proceedings, but that of a blogger who has gained entry to the trial as a reporter, the anonymous "Emptywheel," whose reportage on the background of this case is surely one of the investigative wonders of the blogging world):

"Mr. Libby was not concerned about losing his job. He was concerned about being set up. He was concerned about being the scapegoat.

"Mr. Libby said to the VP, 'I think the White House people are trying to set me up, people want me to be the scapegoat. People in the White House want me to protect Karl Rove.' …

"Cheney made notes of what Libby said. Notes show Libby telling the Vice President that he was not involved in leak. …

"Cheney's note: 'Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.'

"The person who was to be protected was Karl Rove. Karl Rove was President Bush's right hand person. Karl Rove was the person most responsible for making sure Bush stayed in office. He had to be protected…."

But who, exactly, is being set up here? Surely not just Libby, but also Libby's boss. Libby is named in the indictment, yet it is the vice president who is really on trial here, as the prosecutor's pretrial tactics and opening statement make clear. After all, it wasn't just Scooter out there on his own planting stories in the media discrediting Ambassador Joe Wilson, implying that he'd been sent to the African nation of Niger on a "junket" at the behest of his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame. Behind Libby stood the shadowy figure of the vice president, directing the action from an undisclosed location. Yet the trial of his former chief of staff threatens to disclose his location at the very center of the conspiracy to "out" Plame.

Libby's defense is (1) Rove did it, and he, Libby, is a "sacrificial lamb," the fall guy for the White House, and (2) he had no reason to lie about the Plame matter, that this was at the extreme periphery of his concerns, and, in "recalling" how he came upon the information that Plame was in fact a CIA agent, he simply failed to remember with any degree of accuracy because of all the weighty matters that he had to deal with in his capacity as chief of staff at the OVP.

Fitzgerald, for his part, will show that this is simply not the case, that the Plame matter was one of Libby's central concerns, and that both he and Cheney could almost be said to be obsessed with Wilson's accusations that the administration was cooking the intelligence to fit a preordained conclusion. Read the full article