Posted on 02/28/2007 4:18:57 PM PST by Jack Black
Want to have this up and ready for when deliberations open at 8:00 AM EST or so.
But wasn't he a Democrat? And aren't all D.C. Juries supposed to be liberal?
PING! Early morning arrival at the thread. Let's check in!
FireDogLake is linking the NY Observer story. The lefties are nothing if not completely consistent in their ability to repeat the same points robotically over and over:
Here's the article from the Observer:
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.
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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 established a trial record that will establish 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 newamericancentury.org.)
Among the 25 signatories to the PNAC founding statement: Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby and Paul Wolfowitz.
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.
JOM has a link up now to a draft of the jury instructions.
I have not read the instructions I was just going by the standard instructions on presumption of innocence and beyond a reasonable doubt. Also on what testimony I have seen in the news. I know the news cannot be read as reliable but I also know that are partisan and hate this administration and that being the case they certainly would not have printed what I have read I do not think if it were not true because most of it really favored Libby.
All of this goes back to the 2000 Election. I can still remember watching TV waiting on Al Gore to give his concession speech and hearing the commentators talking about Gore and the Dem machine sending lawyers to South Florida.
I honestly believe that the Democratic machine had been holding a few Democrat-bastion counties in reserve for several elections, waiting for just such an occasion. Had it not been Florida, I think they would have used St. Louis and the troubles there.
Just to rebutt the Observer article one more time:
1. Debunking and discrediting your oppostion is not a crime, is not immoral, and is not even dirty politics. The left continue to talk about the "smear campaign" against Wilson as if it is Watergate II, it is not.
2. Wilson lied, or was lied to and repeated a whopper of a story, that Cheney had asked him to go to Niger.
3. Wilson lied when he said his wife had nothing to do with him getting the Niger posting. In fact she wrote a memo requesting it.
4. It appears to be untrue that Wilson report bolstered the idea that the Iraqi's were not looking for Uranium. In fact his report gave creedence to that suggestion.
5. Most evidence does, in fact, show that Iraq was trying to buy more yellowcake from Saddam.
6. Therefore Wilson's famous Op-Ed piece was both in at least mild contradiction to his verbal report to the CIA and in direct contradiction to the facts as now known.
7. Given the above it makes sense that Cheney and perhaps Bush wanted to discred him. He deserved to be discredited because he was lying. (Again though, doesn't matter, discrediting or casting dispersion on people is a part of hardball.)
8. Valerie Plame was not a Foreign Intelligence Agent, so the draconian punishment the left drooled over were never going to happen for 'outing' here. She was not covered.
9. Valerie Plame's identity may or may not even have been 'classified'. If it was classified the breaking of that classification was certainly of less import thatn other recent celebrated revelations in the press, such as the NSA 'domesting wiretapping' revelation or the 'international banking' revelation.
No special prosecutors were appointed for these more serious leaks. Leaks are a big part of how politics works in Washington, in case you haven't been paying attention.
10. The strange coincidences: Wilson not being asked to sign a standard non-disclosure form by the CIA, Wilson not being asked to keep his CIA work secret, Wilson not being asked to file a written report, Wilson joining the Kerry campaign suggest that the entire Wilson/Plame affair may have been a set up from day one. Another fact that no doubt pissed off Cheney and drove him.
11. Fitz new who the original leaker to the press was from day one: Richard Armitrage. Thus one is left to wonder what the investigation was about.
12. Early on he apparently decided that Armitrage had committed no crime in "outting" Plame. As he has not been charged with anything. Thus many of the statements Fitz made in his dramatic press conference announcing the indictment "Mr. Libby was the first to tell the press" were incorrect, and he new it.
13. Despite all this it is possible that Libby lied to the FBI and Grand Jury and knew perfectly well that he had heard Val's status from administration officials (as the record indicates) and not from Russert and the Time reporter.
In summary if the MSM stuck to reporting on 13, what the trial at hand is about, without repeating the disinformation that is already completely discredited over and over and over about 1-12 I would respect their reporting.
Of course "a aid to the VP lied about who he heard some stuff from to the FBI" isn't going to prove the entire Cheney/Halliburton/Blood-for-Oil conspiracy, so it's not that useful to leftists.
And of course if scooter is found guilty of anything the left will insist that items 1-12 are now PROVED, when in fact only item 13 will be proved. This will make some of us go crazy with rage, but there is nothing we can do about it.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The jury deciding if former vice presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby lied when questioned about who revealed a CIA analyst's identity began its seventh day of deliberations on Thursday.
The panel is considering whether Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, lied to investigators seeking to determine who leaked Valerie Plame's identity in 2003 after her husband accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence to build its case for the Iraq war.
Libby faces five charges: two counts of perjury, two counts of making false statements and one count of obstruction of justice. He faces up to 30 years in prison and $1.25 million in fines if found guilty.
The jury sought guidance about the charge that Libby made a false statement to the FBI regarding a conversation with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper about Plame.
Reuters reports on the start of DAY SEVEN:
Libby's attorneys argued he could not accurately recall conversations about Plame when he spoke months later to the FBI and testified before a grand jury.
Nobody has been charged with intentionally identifying Plame, the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson.
I really need a ping for these deliberation threads.
Thanks
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