Slashdot Mirror
Bush Commutes Libby's Sentence
An anonymous reader notes that President Bush has decided to commute Scooter Libby's sentence after numerous appeals failed. Libby was convicted in March of obstruction of justice in connection with the Valerie Plame affair. The President's action spares Libby from 30 months behind bars."
It's OK when Clinton pardons drug dealers, murderers, and illegal alien bank robbers.
Clinton pardoned over 140 people at the end of his term, this is nothing new or unique to this president nor any others in the future.
...so I would beg you, please don't post non-relevant articles here. Slashdot is better then that...
It isn't like he committed treason to do this (at least not in the sense that Libby and Cheney did).
Ahem... From the US Constitution, Article III, Section 3:
Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
While Libby did do some low-life scum-sucking things, "treason" is a pretty loaded word (and patently false in this case). Please be more careful in the future.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
Uh, you realize that Libby neither did any of those things, nor was he accused of any of those things, nor was he convicted of doing any of those things, right? The people who have been doing those things, and giving every possible aid and comfort to the enemy are principly the opponents of the war, including some former white house officials, such as the one who actually leaked the information. And of course the greatest aid and comfort is given to the enemy by the likes of Joe Wilson with his false public article about how he discovered that Iraq wasn't trying to by Uranium from Niger (when it turned out that it was), and half of the Congressional Democrats who slander the troops fighting the war and who regularly predict their ultimate failure.
Wow, you got troll and over rated for telling the truth. Well most of it.
It turns out you have to know an agent is covert when pointing them out. Armatage claims he seen her at so many public functions he never suspected Plame as being covert. This is the main reason he hasn't been charged. There is nothing indicating he knew she was covert or his disclosure was intentional. and that's why no law was broken.
I heard in an interview on PBS with the reporter that first broke the story (Robert Novad?) that is was at some function and Armatage had been drinking, people were talking about the Niger report what's his name returned and was publicly talking about, And the reporter said, who sent him to Africa, something else and Armatage said it was his wife, she works at the CIA and then pointed her out. From that, we have a major conspiracy detailing Bush and Cheney as the devil incarnated itself.
I think this is exactly what this presidential power was designed for. This is an example of a prosecution that could never have happened outside an atmosphere of a political witch hunt with one political branch trying to cause damage to another in whatever way possible. The president gave the benefit of the doubt to the jury but got rid of the rediculously unproportional sentence. To me it's just a brief moment of sanity in Washington to enjoy before it's gone.
First, thanks for reminding me to contribute to the defense fund.
Second, presidents are SUPPOSED to be activist. That's the point. Legislators too. It's called republicanism. Also known as democracy. They derive their power from the people who elect them according to the constitution. That same constitution gives no political power to Judges, but requires that they simply settle cases according to the written law and the testified facts. When Judges usurp political power from the elected branches, they usurp it from the people. Which, for example, is why we needed a war to resolve the slavery issue, because the S.C. took it upon itself to decide it for the people, leaving the people no peaceful or democratic recourse for change. It's the same reason we'll need a war for the people to express their will on the abortion issue unless the S.C. reliquishes that to the rightful lawmakers as well.
> I think if Bush was going to pardon him he would have done it now.
I suspect Libby asked NOT to be pardoned. He still has a pretty good chance of clearing his name once he can get outside the Beltway's reality distortion field. A pardon would leave a permanent taint, a whiff of 'did something wrong but Shrubbie covered for him." which we are seeing play out here anyway because most LLL types don't actually know very much about our political system and even less about the facts in the Plame affair.
The jury that convicted Libby was a crime against justice, hand picked from the craziest denizens of DC to "Get Rove". The plan was for Fitzgerald to roll Libby to get Karl Rove. But his case disintegrated so he settled for just screwing Libby over. That jury looked more like the Daily Kos than America.
If you want a perfect AB comparison of justice in DC, Libby was going to prison for, worst case, political ass covering of the sort that happens every minute of every day in DC (at bes for only having a bad memory) while Sandy "Pants Burgler" Berger walked after finally being cornered by the facts and CONFESSING to stealing classified documents by stuffing them into his pants/socks/etc to remove them from the National Archives for the purpose of destroying them. What they were we will of course never know, only that they were incriminating enough to somebody (Bill, Hillary?) to justify such an extreme effort to destroy them.
Democrat delenda est
With the track record of the CIA do you actually think that "knowing better" is such a stretch? Why do you hold them in such high regard?
The CIA would like to put everyone from the Director down to the Janitor on covert status if they thought they could get away with it.
Let's not forget that we had a sitting President not too long ago that lied under oath and obstructed justice (and these are DOCUMENTED FACTS!), and NOTHING happened to him! NOTHING! So, why are we so upset that someone close to a sitting President did the same thing? The precedent had already been set about 10 years ago by our then sitting President!
And don't give me this "well, that was just about sex" schtick. If it's wrong, it's wrong regardless WHY it happened!
In this case, by a straight reading of the law, it isn't treason, mother-fucking or any other kind. It isn't even a federal violation, since she hadn't been overseas in a NOC position in 6 years.
BTW, if you want to get into the whole 'lying to the American people is a crime' thing, why hasn't her husband been prosecuted for the same thing? I mean, what Joe Wilson said in his NYT piece is directly contradicted by the portions of his report that were released by the 9/11 Commission as public record. You know it's bad when you lie the way Libby did. But to get hoist within a year by _your own report_? That's just, well, pathetic.
> It's irrelevant whether Libby was the first to name her or not, since he was not charged with "outing" Plame.
You recognize that unfortunately far to many of the 'nail him and any other neo-con to the wall' group do not.
> Libby lied under oath. That used to be bad enough to impeach a president or two.
Exactly... it was Libby, not the sitting president... what's your point?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
"Outing" a CIA agent should certainly be illegal in any case, but in this case no covert agent was outed. This is the kind of act that should be illegal on general principles, even though it does not in fact aid the enemy in any way.
What you seem to be missing here is that Valerie Plame had once operated on "emabassy cover", which is not covert: "embassy cover" is the opposite of "under cover". No CIA agent who has been posted to a US Embassy can ever work as a covert agent. Foreign intelligence services assume that a significant percentage of embassy employees are CIA agents, and treat them all as such. Your "cover" is blown--permanently--the moment you show up for work at an embassy. The "spies" work under "non-official cover", the overt information gatherers work under embassy cover.
In this specific case it was even stranger: Libby was convicted of lying to cover up something that was not a crime. Perhaps he thought at the time he was protecting Cheney/Rove/somebody, but he wasn't. Commuting his sentence in this case may be morally wrong, but it isn't any sort of quid pro quo because Libby didn't actually do anything helpful for Bush&co.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Libby didn't commit a crime - the jury was a bunch of DC residents who couldn't get out of jury duty (read: unemployed morons). And unlike in the Martha Stuart case where there was a paper trail detailing a deception, all of the Libby trial came down to a what amounted to a little confusion on the part of a very busy man.
And it's a distraction from the real issue which was why this CIA totty put her husband up to go lie about what he witnessed in Niger and why the CIA wanted a totally unqualified windbag like Joe Wilson to smear the truth about Saddam's persuit of nuclear weapons.
People get so caught up in process sometimes when they are losing the argument on facts. Joe Wilson is a proven fraud who leaked his own wife's name to get attention when everyone in the DC establishment was ignoring him after he got back from Niger.
Some politicians are corrupt - but not all. But those that aren't corrupt are ones you don't like either (Coburn, DeMint, etc.) And you're still here, achieving nothing, bitching about things from the sidelines, maybe voting and maybe donating to sham organizations where your donation has at best a 20% efficiency.
Partisan discussion about American politics! Shocking!! Next you'll tell me there's fornication in whorehouses!!!
: )
William Novak, who is himself a deeply partisan journalist, leaked the information about Plame. Richard Armitage was plainly one of his sources. Being one of his sources did not make him the only source. There was a clear propoganda effort, through both the President's and the Vice President's offices, to discredit Ambassador Wilson, for strictly political purposes.
Libby was a clear leader in this propaganda effort. Conveniently, all of his misremembrances were self-serving. The evidence clearly showed to a jury of his peers that he lied to investigators to cover up his propoganda activities. Whether he did so to cover up criminal activities, or merely politically embarassing facts are immaterial. He shamelessly lied in a criminal fashion regarding a matter of national security.
His behaviour is part of a larger pattern of Executive misbehaviour under the current administration. All other avenues of reining in the President's abuses of power have been ineffective, therefore impeachment remains the only remaining option.
evanchik.net
I love when the right wingers bring out the Sandy Berger charade. It's bad enough that Berger violated the classified information acts so why do you have to lie about it?
Look up the facts somewhere other than RedState or LittleGreenFootballs. The results of the actual investigation are on line after all.
Berger pulled research information before testifying before congress. He had authorization to pull that information but he did NOT have any clearance to remove it. During the course of his research, he printed up several files and wrote down notes. He was also NOT allowed to remove notes.
Berger stated that he put the notes in his pants. He was stating, awkwardly that he put scraps of paper in his pockets as he later clarifed. The right wing blogs went up in shrieks of indignation first claiming that Berger put DOCUMENTS down his pants, then in his underwear, then into his socks. I've found chronologies on the web linking back to the actual progression of the misinformation. Berger never stated that he stuffed DOCUMENTS into his waist band or his underwear or his socks. These were all off-the-cuff bloviation by pundits and partisian talking heads and they're now ingrained into the right-wing history. Further, the National Archives which investigated the matter has NEVER stated that that Berger did anything but put notes into his pockes in regard to this particular issue.
The second infraction was the removal of printed copies of actual documents. Berger admitted that he printed up copies of electronic documents in order to study. Berger admitted that he knowingly violated the rules by removing these COPIES so that he could review them at home. Berger knew this was wrong. It's my opinion that he was too arrogant to believe that he should have to do all of his research in the Archives. He was Sandy Berger after all. Berger destroyed the copies when he was finished with them because he knew they weren't supposed to be outside of the archives.
Berger NEVER DESTROYED AN ORIGINAL DOCUMENT. The National Archives report concluded that no materials were removed and Berger only printed electronic documents.
This is why Berger was fined and not imprisoned. If he had destroyed actual documents from the archives he'd have been hoisted on a petard.
You're either stupid or a liar for posting that crap about socks here. Which one is it?
ffakr.
I'm not feeling witty so bite me