Libby verdict in,

[fastpat]

Originally posted by lendaddy
The dark cloud for the dems silver lining is that Fitz says it's over and he's going back to his day job.

His day job IS "Special Prosecutor".

[lendaddy]

Originally posted by fastpat
His day job IS "Special Prosecutor".

Uhhh no, he says this investigation is inactive.

[BRPORSCHE]

Originally posted by legion
Pavlov would have a field day with you guys...

I don't think just Pavlov, but also his dogs.

[speeder]

What would Pavlov think of Rush Limbaugh and Faux News? Those guys are as predictable as a freakin' cukoo clock.

[lendaddy]

Originally posted by speeder
What would Pavlov think of Rush Limbaugh?

He'd probably be a featured sponsor

[the]

Originally posted by speeder
What would Pavlov think of Rush Limbaugh and Faux News? Those guys are as predictable as a freakin' cukoo clock.

and as predictable as Keith Olberman and network news.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by the
and as predictable as Keith Olberman and network news.

Since Oldbermann is usually responding to Bush II, it's fair to say his subject matter is predictable, but his intensity and factual responses are apparently not well predicted by Bush II, because if they were, he'd not utter such feeble words.

[Kraftwerk]

Originally posted by legion
Nevermind that this is all about the equivalent of outing Richard Simmons...

No, this is about someone taking money out of your pocket.
Do you know how many tax dollars go into training a CIA agent? Then one of our own countryman calls them out, she cannot be used undercover ever again. I find it disgraceful. No grace at all and a tad unconstitutional.

[Rick Lee]

Kratfwerk, don't worry about that. Plame and Wilson will pay more in income taxes on their book and movie deal revenue than the CIA ever spent training her. And they'll make FAR more money from this whole thing than had they both worked into old age for the fed. gov't.

[Rick Lee]

Furthermore, I'd say the CIA needs to train their people a little more so things like this don't happen again. Train their pub. affairs officer to NOT confirm to a reporter that someone who is allegedly under cover works at the agency. Train their operations folks to NOT let a special envoy or liaison write an op-ed in the NYT after going on a mission for them and train them to make all such envoys sign confidentiality agreements before going on such missions. Maybe even train them to NOT lie to Congressional oversight committees. That would save all of us a lot of grief in the future.

[hytem]

If Cheney was a Democrat, and the Congress was Republican,
the Congress would be on him like a rabid dog, screaming for his impeachment.

[lendaddy]

Originally posted by hytem
If Cheney was a Democrat, and the Congress was Republican,
the Congress would be on him like a rabid dog, screaming for his impeachment.

For what?

[Rick Lee]

Since Cheney hasn't even been accused of any wrongdoing, much less been indicted or had a special prosecutor come after him, I don't know why folks would be screaming for his impeachment.

[fintstone]

Originally posted by hytem
If Cheney was a Democrat, and the Congress was Republican,
the Congress would be on him like a rabid dog, screaming for his impeachment.

Actually the investigation exonerated Cheney. Tough break for liberals.

[fintstone]

Originally posted by Kraftwerk
No, this is about someone taking money out of your pocket.
Do you know how many tax dollars go into training a CIA agent? Then one of our own countryman calls them out, she cannot be used undercover ever again. I find it disgraceful. No grace at all and a tad unconstitutional.

But the press actually "outed her"...if anyone did. And they were first given the info by a anti-war, anti-Bush guy.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by fintstone
Actually the investigation exonerated Cheney. Tough break for Americans.

Not exactly, Cheney's turn in the barrel is coming. One wonders if Libby will get a "consulting fee" at the end of his prison time like Webster Hubbel did. $750,000.00 for ole Web.

For Cheney, Political Toll May Follow Libby Verdict

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: March 7, 2007

WASHINGTON, March 6 — In legal terms, the jury has spoken in the Libby case. In political terms, Dick Cheney is still awaiting a judgment.
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Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

For weeks, Washington watched, mesmerized, as the trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. cast Vice President Cheney, his former boss, in the role of puppeteer, pulling the strings in a covert public relations campaign to defend the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq and discredit a critic.

“There is a cloud over the vice president,” the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, told the jury in summing up the case last month.

Mr. Cheney was not charged in the case, cooperated with the investigation and expressed a willingness to testify if called, though he never was. Yet he was a central figure throughout, fighting back against suggestions that he and President Bush had taken the country to war on the basis of flawed intelligence, showing himself to be keenly sensitive to how he was portrayed in the news media and backing Mr. Libby to the end.

With Tuesday’s verdict on Mr. Libby — guilty on four of five counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice — Mr. Cheney’s critics, and even some of his supporters, said the vice president had been diminished.

“The trial has been death by 1,000 cuts for Cheney,” said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist. “It’s hurt him inside the administration. It’s hurt him with the Congress, and it’s hurt his stature around the world because it has shown a lot of the inner workings of the White House. It peeled the bark right off the way they operate.”

The legal question in the case was whether Mr. Libby lied to investigators and prosecutors looking into the leak of the name of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson, whose husband, the former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times accusing the White House of distorting pre-war intelligence. Mr. Cheney scrawled notes on a copy of the article, asking “did his wife send him on a junket?”

Now, Mr. Cheney faces a civil suit from Mr. Wilson.

The political question was whether Mr. Libby, the vice president’s former chief of staff, was “the fall guy” for his boss, in the words of Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. Though the defense introduced a note from Mr. Cheney worrying that Mr. Libby was being sacrificed to protect other White House officials, some say the vice president bears responsibility for the fate of his former aide, known as Scooter.

“It was clear that what Scooter was doing in the Wilson case was at Dick’s behest,” said Kenneth L. Adelman, a former Reagan administration official who has been close with both men but has broken with Mr. Cheney over the Iraq war. “That was clear. It was clear from Dick’s notes on the Op-Ed piece that he wanted to go get Wilson. And Scooter’s not that type. He’s not a vindictive person.”http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/washington/07cheney.html?ex=1330923600&en=0e519650a975ea34&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

[kach22i]

If they could get this story down to 1/3 of it's size and imply that George Costanza (Seinfeld character) had sex with the cleaning lady it might get some real traction. 8)

Libbygate: Now Let's Get to the Real Story
by Dave Lindorff

So Scooter Libby has taken the fall.

Three and a half years and a long bloody war after he and a gang of war-mongers in the White House and Blair House, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, set out to undermine and trash the reputation of an Iraq war critic, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, Libby has been found guilty of perjury, lying to the FBI and obstruction of justice by a Washington jury.

Now maybe special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and what passes for journalists in the mainstream media can get down to the real business of finding out just why the entire White House smear operation was unleashed upon a minor state department official and why they went so far as to violate federal law and expose his CIA-operative wife, Valerie Plame, in the process destroying her entire network of contacts for monitoring the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

Because that's what this whole Libby story is really about.

The whole focus of the media in this case has been on the narrow, inside-the-Beltway question of who leaked information about Plame to the media. Entirely forgotten or ignored has been what this leak was all about to begin with. For that, you have to go back and look at what Wilson did in the first place that so enraged or frightened the Vice President and the President.

And that was to go to Niger, one of the poorest nations in Africa, to prove conclusively that there was no truth to a set of forged notes on the letterhead of the Niger embassy in Rome, purporting to be receipts for 400 tons of Niger uranium ore allegedly being sought by Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

Wilson knew those documents were cheap forgeries--the name of the mines official on the papers was someone who hadn't been in office for years--but he went to Niger anyhow, just to make doubly certain that no such purchase attempt had been made.

None had. So the real question then is, who is behind those forged documents? There is an interesting story here--and an important mystery to be solved.

As it happens, way back in early 2001 there was a pair of burglaries at the Niger Embassy in Rome and at the home of the Niger ambassador. Police investigating the crimes found that the only things stolen were official stationary and some official stamps, used to make documents official. A cleaning lady and a former member of Italy's intelligence service were arrested for the crimes. They were odd burglaries to be sure, since there is precious little one could use, or sell, such documents for, given the country involved. I mean, it might make sense to steal official stationary from the French Embassy in Rome, which a thief might use to finagle a pass to the Cannes Festival. But Niger?

Jump to October 2001. A few weeks after the 9-11 attacks, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, accompanied by his ministers of defense and intelligence, made a visit to the White House. There he reportedly handed over the forged Niger documents (they were on Niger government stationary, and had Niger government stamps!), which appeared to be receipts for uranium ore, made out to Saddam Hussein. Now forget the matter of why either Hussein or Niger's government would want paper receipts for such an illegal transaction, and forget the matter of how Hussein would have transported 400 tons of yellow dust across the Sahara to his country without somebody noticing. The simple fact is that Bush's own intelligence experts at the CIA and State Department promptly spotted the forgeries, and they were dumped.

We know this because we know, from the likes of onetime National Security Council counterterrorism head Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, that Bush was pushing for war with Iran almost as soon as he finished reading My Pet Goat following the attack on the Twin Towers. Surely if the White House had even thought those Niger documents might be legit, they would have leaked or broadcast them all over creation.

They didn't. The documents were deep-sixed, and mentioned to no one.

But according to some dedicated investigative reporters at the respected Italian newspaper La Repubblica, they resurfaced before long at a very suspicious meeting. This meeting occurred in December 2001 in Rome, and included Michael Ledeen, an associate of Defense Department Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith and a key figure in the White House's war-propaganda program, Larry Franklin, a top Defense Intelligence Agency Middle East analyst who later pleaded guilty to passing classified information to two employees of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), convicted Iraqi bank swindler Ahmed Chalabi, then head of the CIA-created Iraqi National Congress, and Harold Rhode of the sinister Defense Department Office of Special Plans, that office set up by the White House and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld under Feith's direction to manufacture "evidence" to justify a war on Iraq. Also at this peculiar meeting were the heads of the Italian Defense Department and of SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency.

According to La Repubblica, it was at that meeting that a plan was hatched to resurrect the forged Niger documents, and to give them credibility by recycling them through British intelligence.

And that is what Bush was referring to when, in his 2003 State of the Union address, he famously frightened a nation by declaring, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Bush lyingly implied that this was new information, when in fact he knew--had to know--that the "evidence" in British hands was the same set of documents he had been offered by Berlusconi almost a year and a half earlier, which had been declared to be bogus.

No mainstream American media organization has pursued this story, or even published the details as reported in Italy. Most Americans, consequently, don't even know what a grand lie Bush and the White House perpetrated upon them and the Congress in order to win approval for an attack on Iraq.

Perhaps now that Libby has gone down for his part in this grotesque crime, some editor will ask the obvious question: Why did the White House and the Office of Vice President go to such extraordinary lengths to attack Wilson and his wife? And more importantly, who was behind those Niger embassy burglaries and the forged uranium ore sale documents? And what was OSP doing meeting in Rome in December 2001 with the head of Italian intelligence?

Make no mistake: this whole story has the odor of a "black ops" designed to target the American people. If so it was an act of high treason. It is not just Libby who should go to jail for this crime. It is the president and vice president.

At this point, whether or not the mainstream media decide to do their job, one has to hope that Fitzgerald, with Libby in the bag, will take the next step and hold the prospect of a lengthy prison sentence recommendation over the convict¹s head in order to try and win from him a promise of cooperation with the prosecution. Because Libby knows who was behind all of this. And that's the real story that needs to be told.

[fastpat]

Excellent article, and right to the point. Bush and Cheney are criminals and should be treated to a trial, and if convicted, should receive an appropriate sentence.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

The pardon will likely come on the last day of Bush's term (assuming he isn't removed from office before then, which seems unlikely). The hubbub surrounding the new presidential inauguration usually provides enough media screen against such things to relegate it to "back page" news. Virtually every outgoing president has done their pardons that way.

[Racerbvd]

Originally posted by Kraftwerk
No, this is about someone taking money out of your pocket.
Do you know how many tax dollars go into training a CIA agent? Then one of our own countryman calls them out, she cannot be used undercover ever again. I find it disgraceful. No grace at all and a tad unconstitutional.

I dought the government spent much money teaching her how to give Blow Jobs.She learned that in JH