Monday, July 2, 2007

Bush Rescues Libby


From my "Capital Games" column at www.thenation.com....


It's appropriate.

The president who led the nation into a disastrous war in Iraq by peddling false statements and misrepresentations has come to the rescue of a White House aide convicted of lying by commuting his sentence. Before the ink was dry on today's court order denying Scooter Libby's latest appeal--a motion to allow him to stay out of jail while he was challenging his conviction--George W. Bush commuted Libby's sentence. Libby will no longer have to serve the 30-month prison sentence ordered by federal district court Judge Reggie Walton. He will, though, have to pay the $250,000 fine that was part of the sentence.

The commutation--which is not a pardon and does not erase Libby's conviction--is a reminder that Bush and his crew do not believe in accountability. Bush has been rather stingy in the use of his pardon power. And regulations issued by his Justice Department note that recipients of pardons should serve their sentences and demonstrate contrition before obtaining presidential absolution. (Libby had expressed no remorse and was not scheduled to report to jail for several weeks.) Yet with this commutation, Bush ducked those requirements, and he is allowing Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, who was found guilty of lying to federal investigators in the CIA leak case, to go unpunished. The fine will be no problem for Libby. His neoconservative friends and admirers will kick in to cover that tab. (Perhaps even Cheney will send a check.)

Libby had become a symbol of the Bush White House's problem with the truth. After all, his lies had been designed to block FBI agents and federal prosecutors from learning the full truth of a White House effort to discredit a critic who had accused the Bush administration of twisting the prewar intelligence. And now the final act in the long-running CIA leak scandal--Bush's commutation--stands as another symbol of this grand theme: lying doesn't really bother this crowd. In the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush claimed he would bring responsibility to the White House and, as a PR stunt, he dubbed his campaign jet Accountability One . Yet with this commutation, he takes the position that in his administration an aide who purposefully misleads government officials investigating a possible national security crime need not be held fully accountable.

This is no shocker. Early on in the CIA leak affair, the White House announced that anyone involved in the 2003 leak that disclosed the CIA employment of Valerie Wilson, an undercover Agency officer, would be booted out of the administration. But Karl Rove, who had disclosed classified information about Valerie Wilson to two reporters and who apparently lied about his actions to White House press secretary Scott McClellan, was not pink-slipped. Bush has never acknowledged this broken promise. (Libby left the White House only after he was indicted in the fall of 2005.)

Bush shielded Rove, and now--better late than never--he's doing the same for Libby. Ever since Libby's conviction in March, neoconservative and conservative Libby partisans have been urging--or demanding--that Bush pardon Libby. They have cried that his indictment, his conviction, and his sentence were travesties of justice. They blasted Bush for declining to intervene in the proceedings, branding the president (their pal!) a coward. They acted as if Bush's refusal to pardon Libby was a personal betrayal of each and everyone of them. They showed more concern for Libby than any of the civilians who have perished in Iraq in the years since they, Libby and their allies engineered the invasion of Iraq. Libby was their cause; he was one of them.

Once again, Bush, being nudged by the neocons, has sent a clear message: telling the truth doesn't matter. Bush has refused to acknowledge that he, Cheney, and other administration officials--to be polite about it--stretched the truth about Iraq and the threat it posed before the war. Today, he says that if you lie to protect the White House (especially the vice president), you can escape retribution. But if Bush, Cheney and the others could get away with big untruths about war, why shouldn't Libby get away with small lies about a cover-up? Fair's fair, right?

The foundation of a democratic judicial system is that the sentence fits the crime. In this instance, the commutation fits the administration.

Posted by David Corn at July 2, 2007 07:58 PM

6 comments:

Ivory Bill Woodpecker said...

The Gang Of Pirates will find it harder to steal the 2008 elections with this albatross around their necks. :)

BTW, three of the late Steve Gilliard's regulars are carrying on for him at groupnewsblog.net. Several of the folks there are saying that Libby must have threatened to start singing if he actually went to jail. I suspect that assessment is correct.

Ivory Bill Woodpecker said...

Also on groupnewsblog.net, I saw that 77% of the US public now thinks the war in Iraq is going badly.

To borrow a joke from SNL a few years back, the other 23% think Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church. ;)

Hajji said...

IBW,

The "singing Libbybird" scenario is certainly a likely theory, but why the pressure from people like those "dead white guys" at the Repugnizan "Debates" and soon-to-be nominee Fred Thompson? Surely they couldn't ALL have a stinking, flea-infested dog in that fight...or COULD they?!!!

Either way, it serves as a "fini" for the neo-thugs as this will cause a general uprising of patriotic Americans determined to restore the government to the PEOPLE of this formerly great nation...ah, hell, who'm I kidding...

-T

capt said...

Our men . . . have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up.... Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to "make them talk," and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later. . . stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.": Philadelphia Ledger newspaper in 1901, from its Manila [Philippines] correspondent during the US war with Spain for the control of the Philippines

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" ... the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret. ": Robert Parry, investigative reporter and author

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One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous: Carl Sagan

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They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war: Eugene Debs



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Thanks ICH Newsletter!

capt said...

If the WaPo or the NYT's actually told the truth they would have headlines SCREAMING:

BUSH ADMITS TO THE ELEMENTS OF THE CRIME - COMMUTES AIDE THAT LIED TO THE GRAND JURY.


capt

capt said...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

Glenn says it all and says it so well. On legal issues his writing is hard to beat.



capt