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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."
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.
"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.
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