| fastpat |
02-23-2007 08:01 PM |
Is Scooter really the can opener...?
The the can of worms in neocon-world. Well, maybe.
Quote:
Dark Clouds Over the White House - Patrick J. Fitzgerald lets the cat out of the bag
by Justin Raimondo
In their whining, complaining, often maudlin closing arguments, Scooter Libby's defense counsel averred that the prosecution had "cast a dark cloud over the White House" – as if that was, in itself, a bad thing, and, in the current context, a very bad thing. Leading prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, in his rebuttal, was quick to retort:
"There is a cloud over the vice president . . . And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice. There is a cloud over the White House. Don't you think the FBI and the grand jury and the American people are entitled to straight answers?"
Libby, Fitzgerald averred, "stole the truth from the justice system."
Ah, but the truth is still out there, waiting to be recovered: the question is, has the trail gone cold? Well, not quite. We know what Fitzgerald's method is: he goes after the underlings, convicts them, and then gets them to "flip" under pressure from a potentially long and arduous prison sentence. There is no doubt, in my mind at least, that that's exactly what he intends to do in this case. After all, he didn't go after one of the most powerful men in Washington just to get a cut-and-dried conviction on a few counts of perjury and obstruction. He's after bigger game. In the hunt for who outed a covert CIA officer named Valerie Plame, Fitzgerald has lived up to his nickname of "Bulldog" – and my guess is that he's going after the big one. Dick Cheney, call your lawyer ….
Okay, so Michael Isikoff disagrees: but, then again, he doesn't know what Fitz knows, or what Murray Waas apparently knows – and that is the existence of secret grand jury testimony implicating the vice president in the effort to "out" Plame.
"What is this case about?" asked Fitzgerald, in his closing arguments. "Is it about something bigger?"
It's always been clear that something more than mere perjury and obstruction of justice is at the heart of Fitzgerald's investigation. That was stated by Fitz from the beginning, when he went into his famous baseball analogy, and compared what Scooter had done – lied to investigators and a grand jury – to throwing sand in the umpire's face. The vision of investigators was obscured: therefore, they couldn't make a judgement about charging under the Espionage Act, or any other statute.
At the time of his indictment, it was clear, at least in these quarters, that Scooter was covering for his boss. Yet Fitzgerald never directly implicated Cheney, or Bush, as he did in his closing arguments, and this has got to be significant as a possible premonitory rumbling of the political earthquake to come.
It's always been obvious that Scooter – characterized as "Cheney's Cheney" inside the Beltway – acted in concert with Cheney. Through much of the trial the prosecution detailed Cheney's personal involvement in directing the response to former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and there can be little doubt that the two of them conspired to expose his wife and her entire overseas operation. Read the whole darn thing; hint, Cheney's next.
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