What's Up Patrick J. Fitzgerald?

[michelle]

Libby Trial Exposes Neocon Shadow Government
By Sydney Schanberg
The New York Observer

05 March 2007 Issue

Day by day, witness by witness, exhibit by exhibit, Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the trial of Dick Cheney's man, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, is accomplishing what no one else in Washington has been able to: He has impeached the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Of course, it's an unofficial impeachment, but it will also, through its documentation, be inerasable. The trial record - testimony, exhibits, the lot - will be there, in one place, for investigators, scholars, reporters and Congress to pore over. It goes far beyond the charges against Mr. Libby. It is, instead, a road map to the abuses of power that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and their shadow government of neoconservatives have committed as the neocons carried out what they had been planning for years: an invasion of Iraq - and other military excursions - for the purpose of expanding American dominion.

From the start, when he was named special prosecutor in late 2003, Mr. Fitzgerald seemed to understand and embrace this much wider significance.

Yet he was careful not to overreach, crafting the indictment of Mr. Libby narrowly: He had lied to a grand jury, and to F.B.I. agents, about leaks he had given his favorite media people to discredit a vocal critic of the war.

The critic was former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Mr. Wilson, whose diplomatic service had included work in Africa, was asked in 2002 by the C.I.A. to investigate unconfirmed reports that Saddam Hussein had recently tried to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger to be further refined to produce nuclear weapons.

Mr. Wilson went to Africa, consulted his sources, and found no meaningful evidence of such a plot. He reported these negative findings to the C.I.A. And further investigations by several parties, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. body, established that the uranium story was phony. Yet Messrs. Bush, Cheney and others in the President's close circle kept presenting the uranium story as part of the pressing rationale for a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Even as the White House found itself apologizing for a January 2003 State of the Union address which continued to tout the uranium story and other known falsehoods about the Iraqi threat, it continued the push for war. The invasion began on March 20, 2003.

Mr. Wilson responded to the White House in a July 6, 2003, Op-Ed article for The New York Times, charging that the administration had manufactured evidence to win support for the war. It was this story, published in the country's most influential news organ, that drove the White House into a frenzy - in particular Mr. Cheney, the administration's leading hawk.

The smear campaign against Mr. Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, went into high gear. Conservative pundit Robert Novak, a frequent conduit for White House whispers, wrote a column on July 14, 2003, attacking Mr. Wilson and outing Ms. Plame as a C.I.A. "operative." The trial has since identified one of the unnamed senior administration officials Mr. Novak cited as his sources: Karl Rove, the advisor closest to the President.

The Justice Department responded to calls for an investigation into the leak by naming the U.S. Attorney for Chicago, Mr. Fitzgerald, as special prosecutor for the case.

Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald gets a conviction, he has created a trial record that establishes the administration's guilt. Sprinkled throughout are the names of most of the neoconservatives who had been planning the current Iraq War ever since the 1991 Gulf War ended with Saddam Hussein still in power.

They came out in the open in 1997 when they formed a Washington think tank of their own - the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Their first public act was a 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, calling for the swift "removal of Saddam Hussein's regime."

Citing those still-undiscovered "weapons of mass destruction," they said: "[W]e can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition ... to uphold the [U.N.] sanctions...."

Then, in 2000, just before Mr. Bush's elevation to the White House by the Supreme Court, the PNAC war-seekers issued a lengthy manifesto calling for a major escalation of the country's military mission. This 81-page document proposed a buildup that would make it possible for the United States to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars." The report depicted these wars as "large scale" and "spread across [the] globe."

Iraq was named as a major threat.

Another aim of this escalation was as follows: "Control the new 'international commons' of space and cyberspace, and pave the way for the creation of a new military service - U.S. Space Forces - with the mission of space control."

Perhaps the eeriest sentence in the document is found on page 51, conjuring up images of 9/11: "The process of transformation ... is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." (The PNAC documents can be found online at www.newamericancentury.org/ )

Among the 25 signatories to the PNAC founding statement: Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalizad.

Most of these names echo throughout the Libby trial record. Besides the damning notes from Mr. Cheney, accounts of conversations between Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby and Mr. Libby's subsequent conversations with other pivotal administration officials, there is at least one document, in Mr. Cheney's handwriting, that suggests the President had direct knowledge of the campaign to discredit Mr. Wilson.

The trial and its record was always all about the unnecessary war - a war created by massive and deliberate lying about an imminent security threat that wasn't there. That's why the President and his men were desperate to shut Mr. Wilson up.

He was the imminent threat - to their delusional empire-building.

Source: www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030207S.shtml

[DT1]

Fitzgerald: No further investigation planned
Michael Roston
Published: Tuesday March 6, 2007
therawstory.com



In a lengthy press conference with reporters after the announcement of four guilty verdicts, federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said that he did not expect the results of the trial of former White House advsier I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to result in further investigations or charges. He also promised "appropriate" support for any Congressional investigation that might follow the trial.

"I do not expect to file any further charges, the investigation was inactive prior to the trial," the Chicago-based federal attorney who led the prosecution said. "We're all going back to our day jobs."

However, Fitzgerald did concede "If new information comes to light, of course we'll do that."

A reporter prompted Fitzgerald on whether he would scale down his recommendations for a sentence if Libby were to offer more information to the prosecution that wasn't previously known.

"They can contact us," Fitzgerald responded of Libby and his attorneys.

Another reporter asked whether or not the prosecution would turn over sealed files from the grand jury investigation to a Congressional investigation. Fitzgerald gave a measured answer.

"If Congress does something or not, we are not going to predict that," he said. "We will do what's appropriate."

Fitzgerald said he and his prosecution team were on pins and needles as they waited for the jury to complete its deliberations.

"Of course I got worried. Lawyers are paid to worry, and some are paid more than others," he joked. "We just sit around worrying about things we have no control over."

But he said that there were no regrets about prosecuting the charges, and he described the trial as necessary because Libby told lies in the course of an important investigation.

"We could not walk away from that, it is inconceivable any prosecutor could walk away from that," he said.

He later added, "We cannot tolerate perjury...if you don't tell the truth, we cannot make the judicial system work."

He also noted that it was very serious that a high level official had lied under oath in a national security-related investigation.

When a reporter asked the prosecutor how the trial will affect the right of the press to protect confidential sources, Fitzgerald gave a lengthy response, emphasizing the uniqueness of the trial.

"What was unique about this case...the reporters involved were not just getting whistleblower tips, it was not whistleblowing, they were not reporting something that otherwise would not have been heard, they were potential eyewitnesses to a crime," he explained.

"We cannot bring the case without talking to reporters, that's irresponsible," he added. "I'm not saying we shouldn't be careful, there should be Attorney General guidelines on resorting to questioning reporters, and it should be a last resort in a very unusual case,
but what people should realize, it's never off the table."
-----
(Mod's note:My position on this is expressed perfectly by justiceofconvienience in therawstory comment thread...dt1)

In America there can be crime in the highest levels of government whereby persons holding high office can conspire to lie and decieve so as to lead us into an illegal and unjust War in which countless people are killed, maimed, jailed and tortured. A show trial ensues which is so limited in scope that the real issues are completely obscured and a verdict is reached in which the sacrificial lamb is found guilty while we all know that he will never see significant prison time. Meanwhile, we have those people in high office stripping us of our Constitutional rights and others are held without due cause, never getting a hearing, are rendered to secret prisons and tortured all in the name of a pseudo war on terror which has been manufactured by those same people who hold office. The truth remains that in spite of the fact that those responsible for these heinous actions are not brought to justice, there are those among us who know the truth of the matter.

[DT1]

(Mod's note:losing sleep trying to keep up with this...
Here is a more or less short story of how it all went down,for those who care...dt1)

The Fall Guy
David Corn
thenation.com

Several minutes after noon on Tuesday, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby sat in a crowded Washington court room and somberly watched as the forewoman of the jury in his obstruction of justice trial pronounced the verdict. "Guilty," she said, regarding Count One. She moved on to the other counts and repeated that word three times. The jury had found Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff guilty on four out of five counts. Libby stared straight ahead. He showed no reaction.

Eleven Washingtonians had convicted a former senior Bush White House aide of lying. The case was narrow. It was not about who had leaked classified information outing Valerie Wilson as an undercover CIA officer; it was not about whether the Bush administration had manipulated the prewar intelligence to whip up public support for the invasion of Iraq; it was not about the war. Still, Libby had been on trial for having deliberately misled government investigators to protect himself--and perhaps the vice president--from a criminal inquiry that had come about because the White House had not been straight with the public about the war. In the face of criticism that the administration had hyped the prewar intelligence, the White House in June and July 2003 went on the offensive and mounted a campaign that included passing information to the media about a high-profile critic, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Cheney's office conducted a push-back operation of its own. In this swirl of damage-control and finger-pointing, administration officials leaked Valerie Wilson's CIA identity. And that leak beget the criminal investigation that caused Libby to lie.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald charged that Libby obstructed justice, committed perjury and made false statements when he told FBI agents and the grand jury investigating the leak that he had possessed no official knowledge of Valerie Wilson and her CIA connection in the days before the leak appeared in Robert Novak's July 14, 2003 column. Libby acknowledged to the investigators that Cheney had told him weeks before the leak occurred that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. But Libby claimed that he completely forgot this and that when Meet the Press host Tim Russert told him days before the leak happened that all the reporters in town knew Wilson's wife was CIA, he believed he was learning this information "anew" as gossip. He then, Libby maintained, passed along this scuttlebutt to two reporters--Judith Miller, then of The New York Times, and Matt Cooper, then of Time--only as unconfirmed rumor.

In Libby's telling, he had not disclosed any official and classified information to journalists. (Valerie Wilson's employment with the CIA was classified.) And a government official cannot be prosecuted for sharing chitchat he or she picked up from journalists. Such a story would take Libby (and any official who had passed him information on Valerie Wilson) out of the line of fire. But only if it were true.

Libby's account, Fitzgerald charged, was a cover story designed to remove him and the vice president from a leak investigation that was targeting the White House. At the trial, Fitzgerald methodically presented a series of witnesses who testified that weeks before the leak they had told Libby that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA: Marc Grossman, who had been undersecretary of state for policy in 2003; Robert Grenier, a former top CIA official; and Cathie Martin, who had been Cheney's communications director. Craig Schmall, Libby's CIA briefer at the time, testified that Libby had discussed Valerie Wilson with him. Schmall also testified that after the leak occurred, while he was briefing both Cheney and Libby, they asked him what he thought about the leak scandal. Noting that some commentators had dismissed the leak as "no big deal," Schmall explained that he considered it a "grave danger." He explained to Libby and Cheney that foreign intelligence services could now investigate everyone who had come into contact with Valerie Wilson when she had served overseas. "Those people," he said, "innocent or otherwise, could be harassed...tortured or killed

Fitzgerald also called Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary, as a witness. Fleischer, who had struck an immunity deal with Fitzgerald in return for his testimony, testified that on July 7, 2003--the day after Joseph Wilson published an op-ed piece accusing the White House of having twisted the prewar intelligence--Libby disclosed Valerie Wilson's CIA link to him at lunch and said this information was "hush-hush." The conversation Fleischer recalled, was "odd." (Fleischer also testified that he had leaked information to two reporters about Valerie Wilson--although it was unclear whether he had done anything more than egg on these reporters to discover her CIA connection. Later in the trial, Washington Post reporter testified that Fleischer had disclosed Valerie Wilson's CIA connection to him.)

Fitzgerald presented three journalists as witnesses who contradicted Libby. Judy Miller claimed Libby had told her about Wilson's wife in three different confidential interviews, beginning with a meeting on June 23, 2003. Matt Cooper testified Libby had confirmed for him the leak about Valerie Wilson he had received from Karl Rove. Russert said there was no way he could have been Libby's source for any information on Valerie Wilson because he knew nothing about her before reading about her in the Novak column.

It was a powerful case. All these witnesses--except Russert--said they had spoken to Libby about Wilson's wife prior to the leak. Three said they had provided Libby information about her. (And Libby had conceded that Cheney had done so, too.) Libby, though, had told the FBI and the grand jury he had known nothing concrete about her at the time of the leak. And his explanation was convoluted: yes, Cheney had told him that Valerie Wilson worked at the CIA; but he had forgotten that the vice president had done so; he then heard about her from Russert and believed this was the first time he was learning about her. This defense--I knew, I forgot, I learned it anew and was surprised--was implausible.

Ted Wells, a tall and charismatic attorney leading Libby's defense, tried to convince the jury that these witnesses were unreliable (and all were similarly misremembering similar events that had not happened). He attempted to make the case seem bigger and deeper than it was. It's a twisted, complicated and dark tale, he said during opening arguments, one of conspiracies, bureaucratic infighting, turf wars, backroom deals, terrorist plots (involving nuclear weapons and anthrax) against the United States, and assorted memory lapses, convenient and accidental. Libby merely had engaged in no-harm-intended forgetfulness about a few "snippets" of conversation, Wells insisted. Moreover, Libby had been "set up" as a "sacrificial lamb" in a White House melodrama starring Cheney, who supposedly was defending Libby from a White House effort designed to protect Rove at all costs. "The case is far more complex than what you heard," Wells told the jurors. He suggested that he would bring Cheney to the stand--and Rove and Libby.

But Wells did none of that. He let Cheney off the hook. (Fitzgerald had prepared for a cross-examination that would last hours.) Rove, too, was not called--even though Libby had claimed he had told Rove about his call with Russert right after it happened. If that had been true, testimony from Rove presumably could have corroborated Libby's version of the Russert phone call--and could have blown a big hole in Fitzgerald's case. A sharp-eyed juror could have read Rove's absence from the witness stand as a sign that Libby had lied. And Libby himself stayed mum during the trial. His lawyers decided it would not be useful to place Libby in the position of having to repeat the same rhetorical acrobatics he had performed during his grand jury appearances. The defense ended its presentation without submitting any evidence to support its dramatic contentions that Libby had been set up by the White House, the CIA, the State Department or NBC News.

The jurors did not appear to have much trouble cutting through all the clutter tossed up by Libby's defense. They spent a week reviewing and organizing all the testimony and evidence (on 34 pages of poster-size paper) before assessing whether Fitzgerald had proved his case. They convicted Libby on the single obstruction of justice count, two perjury counts (regarding his testimony to the grand jury) and one false statement count (stemming from an FBI interview). The jury acquitted him on the weakest count in the indictment--a false statement count related to what he had told the FBI about his conversation with Matt Cooper.

Libby said nothing as he left the courtroom. He looked neither resigned nor surprised. Minutes later, he appeared with his lawyers in front of reporters and camera crews outside the courthouse. Wells declared his client was "totally innocent" and that they would continue to fight. He said he would file a motion for a new trial and that if that motion is denied, he will file an appeal. "Mr. Libby will be vindicated," he proclaimed. Libby made no comment.

After Libby and his lawyers walked off, Fitzgerald strode toward the microphones. He noted he was "gratified" by the verdict and explained that he had had no choice but to pursue Libby once he suspected that Cheney's former chief of staff had lied under oath. "It's every prosecutor's duty," he asserted. He declined to say what the verdict and case said--if anything--about the White House and the vice president's office. During the trial, he had declared that Libby's lies had placed a "cloud" over the vice president. Was such a cloud still present? he was asked. Fitzgerald refused to answer the question, but he said that by lying to the grand jury and the FBI, "Mr. Libby had failed to remove that cloud....Sometimes when people tell the truth, clouds disappear. Sometimes they do not."

Fitzgerald defended his decision to subpoena reporters--and to imprison Judy Miller for 85 days--stating that he had to question journalists in order to determine if Libby had lied to the investigators. But he cautioned that other prosecutors ought to be "very careful" when considering whether to chase after journalists as witnesses. He added that he did not expect to file any further charges. His investigation was done.

The trial was not a satisfying end to the leak case. Fitzgerald's mission was not to discover the whole truth of the saga and reveal all to the public (as he pointed out when speaking to reporters today). He was on the hunt for a crime--and for criminals. He ultimately concluded he could not prosecute the leakers--Rove, Libby, and then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage--for having disclosed information regarding Valerie Wilson. (The law prohibiting government officials from intentionally revealing information about clandestine intelligence officials requires a prosecutor to prove the leaker knew the officer was undercover.) So his criminal investigation focused on whether Libby lied. (He also investigated Rove for having possibly lied to the grand jury but ultimately decided not to indict him.) Consequently, only information from his investigation related to the Libby cover-up became public. What else Fitzgerald uncovered remains a secret. And per the rules governing criminal cases, it will stay a secret, he told reporters.

After the verdict was delivered, only one juror, Denis Collins, a Washington Post reporter in the 1980s, spoke to the press. He noted that jurors more than once asked, Why was Libby here, not Rove, not someone else? "Where are these other guys?" he said. The jurors were convinced, he noted, that Libby was guilty as charged (on four of the counts). But the jurors also believed he had been ordered by Cheney to talk to reporters as part of the White House's spin operation. In other words, some White House wrongdoers or conspirators (if not conspirators in the strict legal definition of the word) had gotten off. But there was nothing the jurors could do about this, he said: "It was not a question of who we could punish about going to Iraq." What about the prospect of a presidential pardon? one reporter asked Collins. Will you feel cheated if Bush pardons him? No, Collins replied: "He's been pilloried. We found him guilty." (Conservatives have already started a campaign for a Libby pardon.)

Scooter Libby, once Cheney's top aide and one of the chief architects of the Iraq war, is now a criminal. He is the first White House official convicted of a crime since the Iran-contra scandal that tarred the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush. He is also a symbol of an administration that has lost credibility. How Bush and Cheney misrepresented the case for war and their disingenuous and dishonest post-invasion assertions about the war are more serious matters than the lies of the leak case. But the leak affair represents how this White House has done business and how it has mugged the truth. Libby is not only a fall guy for Cheney; he's a poster-child for the Bush administration. The guilty verdict applies only to Libby, but the guilt extends beyond.

******

[michelle]

The freeing of Lewis Libby: Government criminality and the class nature of American “justice”
By Bill Van Auken
4 July 2007

The decision of the Bush White House to commute the jail sentence of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby is a telling demonstration of both the criminal character of the US government and the inequality that pervades American society.

Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison on felony counts of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying to FBI agents and a federal grand jury in an attempt to derail their investigation into the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Now he will go scot-free, his sentence rescinded before he served a single day in jail.

While the commutation left in place the conviction, as well as a $250,000 fine and two years of probation, Bush refused on Tuesday to rule out granting Libby of a full pardon before he leaves the White House. “I rule nothing in or nothing out,” Bush said when asked about a potential pardon.

So much for Bush’s solemn declaration the previous day that he “respected” the jury’s verdict and his talk of the serious nature of the crimes of perjury and obstruction of justice.

As for the fine, there is no doubt that it will be more than repaid by Libby’s wealthy backers, who have already raised $5 million for his defense fund and mobilized a small army of ex-officials, lawyers, wealthy developers and the leading figures of the Republican right on his behalf.

The reason Libby’s prosecution has turned into a cause célèbre for this socio-political layer is that the lies he told federal investigators were part of a conspiracy to cover up far bigger lies that were used to drag the American people into a criminal war launched to further the profit interests of the corporate elite.

Plame’s identity was leaked to the right-wing columnist Robert Novak and other members of the media in an attempt punish and intimidate her husband, Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who exposed some of the phony evidence about weapons of mass destruction that was used to justify the Iraq war.

The investigation that culminated in Libby’s conviction was launched by the Justice Department, which, at the urging of the CIA, appointed Patrick Fitzgerald, the US attorney in Chicago, as a special counsel. The leaking of Plame’s identity angered CIA officials, who said it was a potential violation of a 1982 law making it a felony to reveal the name of a covert agent.

It was clear from the outset that the drive to silence Wilson came from Cheney and the White House itself. In the opening stages of the trial, Libby’s lawyer portrayed his client as a “fall guy” for higher-ups, a characterization the jury apparently found apt. It was revealed after the trial that while convicting Libby, jurors openly questioned why others—including key Bush aide Karl Rove—were not also on trial.

Then, in an unanticipated turn of events, the defense abruptly rested its case without calling Cheney, Rove or Libby himself to the witness stand. It was clear that Libby and his lawyers had decided virtually to concede guilt rather than pursue the line of defense they had laid out at the trial’s opening.

It was more than an educated guess, widely discussed in the media at the time, that Libby had been given assurances that Bush would intervene to prevent him spending any time in prison. The decision to issue a presidential order wiping out Libby’s jail term was the legal equivalent of hush money, designed to buy Libby’s silence on the crimes of the Bush White House and Cheney’s office, in which Libby himself played a central role.

Bush’s decision to commute the sentence was portrayed by the White House as an act of mercy, aimed at ameliorating an “excessive” penalty while upholding the sanctity of the jury’s verdict. It was nothing of the kind. Like everything else done by this administration, it was an act of lawlessness aimed at covering up crimes and defending unfettered executive power.

As the Washington Post pointed out Tuesday, the sentence was anything but excessive. “Three of every four people convicted of obstruction of justice have been sent to prison over the past two years, a total of 283 people, according to federal judiciary data,” the Post reported. “The average term was more than five years. The largest group of defendants were sentenced to between 13 and 31 months in prison, exactly where Libby would have fallen on the charts.”

The decision to grant clemency—taken without any consultation with either Fitzgerald or the Justice Department’s pardon attorney—was aimed at assuring maximum secrecy, since such decisions are subject to no review and even documents relating to them are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

The commutation of Libby’s sentence provides one more confirmation that this government considers itself entirely above the law and operates more along the lines of a crime family than a democratic and constitutional administration.

The response to the White House’s freeing of Libby by both the media and the ostensible political opposition in the Democratic Party has been notably muted.

The various Democratic presidential candidates issued sound bytes for the occasion. Hillary Clinton said that the commutation showed that in the Bush administration “cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice,” while Barack Obama said it “cements the legacy of an administration characterized by a politics of cynicism and division.” The issue has presented some political problems for the latter candidate, as the Obama campaign’s general counsel Robert Bauer came out in Libby’s defense, drafting an article entitled, “Progressive Case for a Libby Pardon.”

In contrast to the response of the politicians, Joseph Wilson delivered a more forthright and angry condemnation of Bush’s actions, calling them representative of a government that is “corrupt from top to bottom.”

“The fact that the president short-circuited our system of justice by giving Scooter Libby a get-out-of-jail-free card, thereby eliminating any incentive that he would tell the truth to the prosecutor, guarantees that there is a cloud of suspicion put over the office of the president and makes him potentially a suspect in an ongoing obstruction of justice case,” declared Wilson, adding, “This was a coverup.”

As for the media, the most strident note was sounded by the Wall Street Journal, which published an editorial describing Libby’s predicament as a “personal tragedy” and declaring Bush’s failure to issue an outright pardon “a dark moment in this administration’s history.”

The Washington Post, which had been highly critical of the prosecution of Libby, agreed with a commutation of Libby’s sentence, but said Bush had gone a bit far in relieving the former aide of all jail time. The Post echoed the argument of the Republican right, comparing Libby’s case to that of President Bill Clinton, “who lied under oath but was not removed from office or put in jail.”

That Clinton was essentially entrapped into lying about an entirely personal matter which had no intrinsic significance for anyone outside of himself and his family, while Libby’s lies were part of a political conspiracy to carry out an illegal war of aggression that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and killed or maimed tens of thousands of US troops, was apparently lost on the newspaper’s editors.

The New York Times went so far as to suggest that the commutation was aimed at buying Libby’s silence. “Presidents have the power to grant clemency and pardons,” the Times noted. “But in this case, Mr. Bush did not sound like a leader making tough decisions about justice. He sounded like a man worried about what a former loyalist might say when actually staring into a prison cell.” Yet, having suggested that Bush himself is guilty of obstruction of justice, the newspaper did not even broach the question of Bush or anyone else being held accountable.

There can be little doubt that Bush took into account this tepid response from the media and the Democrats—compared with the fulminations of the Republican right—in determining that, a day after commuting Libby’s sentence, he could get away with suggesting that he may yet grant him a blanket pardon.

What is to account for the lack of genuine outrage within what once passed for the liberal establishment centered in the Democratic Party and sections of the press? It is all the more striking given the overwhelming popular hostility to Bush’s commutation, with polls showing at least 70 percent disapproval.

In the final analysis, Libby’s real crime is not that he lied about matters related to the exposure of a single CIA operative, though leading Democrats have welcomed this issue as a chance to portray Republicans as “traitors” and enemies of national security. Rather, the crime Libby, Cheney and the rest committed and then sought to defend in the Plame-Wilson matter was the promotion of an illegal war based upon lies.

Behind the muted response is undoubtedly an element of “there but for the grace of God go I” from co-participants in the corrupt and criminal activities of the US government. They, after all, work in the same protected and privileged bubble as Libby and his associates.

While a few Democratic members of the House have suggested hearings on the commutation, even if they are held they will inevitably become an exercise in damage control, under conditions in which the entire political establishment is up to its necks in deceit and corruption.

There is an additional social and political dynamic at work here. Within the entire political and media establishment there is a firm conviction that the savage “criminal justice” system in the US is not meant for possessors of wealth and purveyors of power such as Libby. Prisons and harsh sentences are in place to suppress and control the masses of poor and working people.

The number of prisoners in America has reached a record 2,245,000, the largest for any nation on earth and nearly 40 percent higher than its closest competitor, China. Last year, the US prison system recorded the biggest increase in the number of inmates since 2000, the Justice Department reported last week. The rise was attributed largely to mandatory sentencing laws, which the administration has sought to toughen still further, while overriding just such a statute in the Libby case.

In a statement defending his decision to commute Libby’s sentence, Bush lamented the fact that the vice presidential aide’s “wife and young children have also suffered immensely” and that “the consequences of his felony conviction on his former life... will be long-lasting.”

No such consideration is given to the millions who are forced into American jails—many on minor offenses, some who are mentally incompetent to stand trial, others who are juveniles but tried as adults. Without the money and power of a Libby, they are caught up in a merciless legal system that continues to send people to their deaths.

In his previous political capacity as governor of Texas, Bush showed none of those on the state’s death row the compassion reserved for Cheney’s underling. He sent to their deaths 150 men and two women—executing the first female in Texas in 100 years, Karla Faye Tucker, and publicly mocking her plea that he spare her life.

This ruthless legal system is a reflection of the brutality visited upon working people in general. Millions are deprived of jobs and pensions, have their wages cut or lose their homes through foreclosures, without an ounce of compassion from the government or the corporate elite that it represents.

The crime of which Libby is guilty—as are Bush, Cheney and others in the military and political establishment—is the same one which formed the principal charge against the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg 60 years ago: conspiracy to wage a war of aggression.

That Libby cannot be punished, even for the tangential offenses of obstructing justice and lying under oath, demonstrates that the entire political establishment, including the Democrats and the media, is implicated in the same underlying crime.


Source:
www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jul2007/libb-j04.shtml
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: See today's post at Conscientious Objector:

Re: Conscientious Objector
« Reply #23 on 07/06/07 at 4:00pm »
Jailed conscientious objector hits out against Libby clemency
Submitted by Canada IFP on Thu, 2007-07-05 19:26.

A veteran who spent 14 months in prison for filing a conscientious objector application against redeployment to Iraq has spoken out against the commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence by President Bush.

Read the rest: tinyurl.com/yorw7n

[michelle]

Feds: Witness says Rezko tried to oust Fitzgerald

Man, I just love how, everyday, more and more of the Bush administration's tactics are exposed. It's good to hear of Fitzgerald again; I hope he gets to prosecute members of the cabal. Remember, Patrick Fitzgerald takes lying very seriously; he views it as a personal assault. And my guess is that, if he were able to handle future cases, that he'd see himself as an extension of the American public!....Michelle

www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-rezko-rove-fitzgerald-web-apr24,0,2332070.story

chicagotribune.com
Feds: Witness says Rezko tried to oust Fitzgerald
U.S.: Fundraiser said he could call in Rove to fire prosecutor
By Bob Secter and Jeff Coen

Tribune reporters

April 24, 2008

In the midst of a corruption trial that has provided plenty of fodder for political cynics, prosecutors alleged that political insiders in Washington and Illinois claimed to be working to choke off a criminal investigation launched by U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald.

At the trial of Antoin "Tony" Rezko, prosecutors revealed Wednesday that former Rezko confidant Ali Ata was prepared to testify that Rezko told him in November 2004 of a plan to pull strings with then- White House political director Karl Rove and have Fitzgerald fired.

Prosecutors also sought to add the testimony of another admitted schemer suggesting that two of the state's most powerful Republican operatives wanted to take the heat off Rezko by dumping the hard-charging prosecutor.

Rove denied the allegations, as did the two Republicans, GOP National Committeeman Robert Kjellander and Springfield power broker William Cellini.

The developments add political intrigue at a trial in which testimony has linked Gov. Rod Blagojevich to pay-to-play politics, highlighted Sen. Barack Obama's long friendship with Rezko and held up an ugly X-ray of the sometimes malignant inner workings of Illinois government.

Ata, a former official in the Blagojevich administration, on Tuesday pleaded guilty in connection with Rezko-related corruption, saying that Blagojevich was present in the room when Ata and Rezko discussed swapping a $25,000 campaign contribution for a job in the administration.

On Wednesday, outside the jury's presence, Assistant U.S. Atty. Carrie Hamilton told U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve that Ata was prepared to testify that Rezko told him Kjellander was working with Rove "to have Fitzgerald removed."

At the time, Fitzgerald also was leading a high-profile investigation into a Bush administration leak of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, a probe that eventually led to the perjury conviction of a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Despite his party affiliation, Kjellander quickly developed close ties with the administration of Blagojevich, a Democrat, after he became governor in 2003. Still, Kjellander disputed the allegations attributed to Ata, as did Kjellander's close friend, Rove.

"I never have discussed with Karl Rove or any other person on the White House staff the proposition that U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald should or could be removed from his office," Kjellander said in a statement. "I have never told anyone that I would discuss with Karl Rove or any other person on the White House staff the proposition that U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald could or should be removed from his office."

Kjellander once served as the treasurer of the Republican National Committee, but is listed as the vice chairman of the national party's committee on arrangements.

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said his client "does not recall" Kjellander or anyone else arguing for Fitzgerald's removal. "And [Rove] is very certain that he didn't take any steps to do that, or have any conversations with anyone in the White House—or in the Justice Department—about doing anything like that," Luskin added. Rove, the former deputy chief of staff to Bush, is a private consultant in Washington.

In her presentation to St. Eve, Hamilton did not indicate whether Ata believed the alleged plot to get Fitzgerald dumped ever got beyond the talking stage, but if it did, clearly nothing worked. Fitzgerald, appointed to his Chicago post in 2001, remains in it today.

Hamilton said the 2004 conversation she wanted Ata to testify to was triggered by a question from Rezko about whether Ata had been interviewed by federal agents.

"Mr. Rezko's explanation, according to Mr. Ata, is that Mr. Kjellander is working with Mr. Rove to have Mr. Fitzgerald removed so that someone else can come in to the U.S. attorney's office and individuals who have been cooperating in this investigation will be dealt with differently," Hamilton explained.

Ata's name did not appear on the prosecution's pretrial list of prospective witnesses, and St. Eve did not rule Wednesday on whether she will allow him to testify nonetheless.

St. Eve did say, however, that she would not allow testimony along similar lines from another witness, Steven Loren, a former lawyer for the state pension board. Prosecutors said they wanted Loren to repeat testimony he gave to the grand jury about a conversation he had about Fitzgerald with Cellini around the same time that Ata and Rezko allegedly had their talk.

Loren told grand jurors that he asked Cellini what he knew about an investigation by federal agents into activities of two state boards Rezko was later accused of corrupting, prosecutors said. They added that Loren claimed Cellini then told him: "Bob Kjellander's job is to take care of the U.S. attorney."

Cellini has not been charged in the case, but prosecutors have labeled him a co-schemer with Rezko in plots to rig the actions of the two state boards in exchange for kickbacks.

Cellini's lawyer, former U.S. Atty. Dan Webb, flatly denied the allegation.

"It did not happen," Webb said in a statement. "It is a complete and utter falsehood. Mr Cellini never made an effort to contact anybody regarding Mr Fitzgerald's service in office."

If Rezko was involved in an attempt to oust Fitzgerald, his timing couldn't have been worse. From a public-relations standpoint, it would have been difficult for the Bush administration to get rid of Fitzgerald in 2004 while he was investigating its involvement in the Plame leak.

Even so, the allegations evoke memories of a controversial Bush administration effort after the 2004 elections to purge U.S. attorneys across the country. The resulting furor over those firings led to the resignation last year of Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales.

As part of that initiative, Justice Department officials ranked all 93 sitting U.S. attorneys from "strong" to "weak." Fitzgerald was lumped in with several that were deemed to have "not distinguished themselves," an assessment with which many in the legal profession strongly disagreed.

Thursday was not the first time Rove's name has come up in connection with an alleged attempt to manipulate the selection of a U.S. attorney for Chicago. Fitzgerald, an import from New York, was nominated for the top prosecutor's post in Chicago in 2001 by then-U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, a Republican often at odds with the state's political establishment. Peter Fitzgerald, who is not related to the U.S. attorney, said Rove had tried to stop him from picking someone from outside Illinois.

Peter Fitzgerald said Rove later told him that the selection of Patrick Fitzgerald had "ticked off the base," a comment the former senator said he took to mean that influential Illinois Republicans were angry about the tough-line the prosecutor quickly adopted on corruption cases.

With the timing of Ata's trial testimony still up in the air—he may not be allowed to take the stand at all—prosecutors continued to stack up evidence against Rezko as his trial plodded ahead, calling to the stand one of his former business associates who had worked at Rezko's North Side offices.

Michael Winter was a former banking executive who testified that Rezko got him involved in seeking what prosecutors contend were bogus "finder's fees" from investment firms after business with state boards.

One such fee was to be split three ways, Winter said, and Rezko was trying to get the biggest chunk by making a simple argument.

"There were other people he had to take care of," Winter explained.

Tribune reporters Mark Silva in Washington and Ray Long in Springfield contributed to this report.

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune