Simple question: Why bring this up? Was going after Al Zarqawi a reason for the war? That's my point. Every time Cheney comes out and says something about Iraq, he's selling the invasion. Otherwise he wouldn't be bringing it up. "We're great because we saved you from the big bad menace of Iraq."
He was definitely one of the many reasons. Of course Cheney was trying to "sell" the invasion. Every elected official tries to sell the public on policy. In this case, the policy was to eliminate the very serious potential threat in Iraq, and the fact that they were a state sponsor of terror (and had been for nearly three decades) was clearly a justification for that.
The fact that a known terrorist was in Iraq at the time isn't exactly a justification for the action. It's nice that we killed the guy, but it's also clear that the whole point of bringing up Al Zarqawi was to tie the words "Al Qaeda" and "Iraq" together to get gullible people (People listening to Rush Limbaugh gullible? Surely I jest...) to think that Iraq had something to do with 9-11.
It wasn't the justification for action, it was one of many, and it was a perfectly valid justification. You can't launch a war against global terrorism and ignore the worlds largest state sponsor of terrorism at the same time.
Why do you think that for years after it was disproved conclusively, the majority of Americans believed that Iraq was at fault for 9-11? I would argue that it's two factors: First, the public seems to be a bunch of morons. Second, Bush and Cheney know that, and they're more than willing to carefully try to tie Iraq to 9-11 and wave the bloody shirt because they know that they can push their agenda that way.
I would argue that option #1 is the overwhelming reason. I would say that a majority of the population wouldn't have been able to point Afghanistan out on a map before the fall of 2001 (who knows, that may still be the case today). All they knew is that Iraq was a big, bad country that we had bombed a few times in the last decade. If you go back and check, nobody in the administration came close to claiming that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks. Sure they talked about Iraq/Jund al-Islam/Zarqawi connections, Iraq's sponsoring of international terrorism, Saddam Hussein offering political asylum to Bin Laden in 1998, and 9/11 teaching us the lesson that we can't ignore these kinds of threats, but all of these points were factually correct, and were pretty darn good reasons to justify war against the regime in Iraq. I would argue that John Q. Public interpreting these points to mean that Iraq supported 9/11 says far more about Mr. Public's cognitive reasoning than it does about the Bush administration's ability to manipulate him.
IMO, you are giving the Bush administration far too much credit. I think they are much better with ideology than they are with politics, and you don't have to go any farther than the past few weeks to prove it. They have been chasing their own tail around in circles while taking an absolute public beating over the dismissal of political appointees that they had every legal and Constitutional right to let go for whatever reason. That doesn't jive with the cunning, man-behind-the-curtains portrayal that you and others are trying to float here. They just aren't that good at the politics side of DC.
al-Zarqawi had been an associate of Bin Laden since 1989, had received money from Bin Laden to organize terrorist cells and carry out terrorist attacks (such as the Raddisson hotel attack in Jordon), and had fled to Iraq from Afghanistan in 2002 after the US defeated the Taliban. His terrorist group, Jund al-Islam, was directly funded by Bin Laden and al Qaeda, and had a very strong presence in Iraq after he joined it with Ansar al-Islam. He even received medical treatment in Baghdad from Uday Hussein's personal doctor. How is this 1) Not the same organization as Bin Laden's al Qaeda, and 2) a connection between al Qaeda and Iraq?
Cheney is basically trying to get everybody to foam at the mouth by implying that Iraq somehow supported the people who attacked us. In reality, there as no Iraqi government support for the attacks against the US he's just playing word games and trying to rationalize a colossal military and foreign policy blunder.
Wrong. Did you even read what he said? Here is the transcript of his interview last week. I defy you to find any statement that is factually incorrect or can in any other way be considered a "lie":
Remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, an Al-Qaeda affiliate. He ran a training camp in Afghanistan for Al-Qaeda, then migrated after we went into Afghanistan and shut 'em down there, he went to Baghdad. He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the Al-Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then of course led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June. He's the guy who arranged the bombing of the Samarra mosque that precipitated the sectarian violence between Shi'a and Sunni. This is Al-Qaeda operating in Iraq, and as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq.
Note that he didn't say that Iraq and al Qaeda had a collaborative relationship, and he didn't say that the Iraqi government supported the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the US. He said that al-Zarqawi was in Iraq before we were, that he organized al Qaeda operations in Iraq before we got there, and that he precipitated sectarian violence in Iraq after we overthrew Saddam Hussein. This isn't playing "word games" - it is stating documented facts that nobody disputes.
Where do you draw the line? Do you believe in giving up your freedom to drive as fast as you can on the wrong side of the road so you won't be slightly more vulnerable to a car accident? Or would you rather pay the price by seeing car accidents all over the road so that you can have "freedom" to drive exactly how you want?
There will always be trade offs between freedom and safety which most people think are completely acceptable, which is why I find it curious that you can claim that you would rather be a victim of a terrorist attack than give up any freedoms.
A two party system is a strength, not a weakness. If you think this country has problems with leadership selected by only 55% of the voting population, how on earth to you think it would be any better if our leadership is selected by 10% or 20% of the voting population? Instead of candidates trying to appeal to the broadest base of voters, we would end up with a broad base of candidates trying to appeal to their own minority niche, and one of those minority niches will end up running everything.
Lie? Are you somehow claiming that al-Zarqawi wasn't in Iraq in 2002, and that he didn't have extensive ties to al-Qaeda? I sure hope not, because those are documented facts, and that is exactly what Cheney has said all along.
Are you confusing human rights with legal rights? The enemy combatants in Gitmo are afforded all of the basic human rights of food, shelter, medical care, and even freedom to practice their religion. But they are not given the same legal rights as US citizens. The Constitution specifically asserts this and the Supreme Court has agreed with this assertion. They have as much "essential liberty" as the Constitution directs an enemy combatant of the State to have.
Right. Dirty politics and unproductive partisan bickering aren't exclusive to the Democratic Party, and didn't start when George W. Bush took office. Unfortunately, that has been the tone in Washington for years.
It seems as though you are confusing the term "unprecedented" with "illegal". I suggest you open up a dictionary to figure our that those terms are not remotely synonymous.
Try at least 3 lies and you might be closer. Seeing as how his testimony was disputed by pretty much everyone, and his defense couldn't find anything to support him and had to fall back on the "oh, he's just a really, really, really forgetful guy" defense, I think he must have known exactly what he was doing at the time, whether he forgot it later or not (which is also bs, of course).
What exactly are you claiming that Libby knew he was doing? He wasn't the source of the leak - he knew that, and the prosecutor knew that during the Grand Jury interviews. Libby had nothing to hide, so why are you claiming that he (a former lawyer, who would presumably know better) would purposefully lie in front of a Grand Jury about something he didn't do?
The answer is that he didn't lie. Sure he gave testimony that conflicted with other witnesses testimony. But the testimony of those other witnesses was also inconsistent. In fact, prosecutor star witness Tim Russert told investigators that "he speaks to many people on a daily basis and it is difficult to reconstruct some specific conversations, particularly one which occurred several months ago", so he wouldn't rule out the possibility that Libby's testimony was wrong. But apparently that kind of reasonable doubt isn't enough to acquit a Republican who is accused of lying about a crime he didn't commit.
If you're not willing to be questioned under oath, then you're probably planning to lie outright, lie by omission, or at least be intentionally misleading. People are expected to testify this way every day, and it's how our system works. This administration seems to think they are above the law.
No. Unfortunately, the way the our system works today is this: Identify your most potent political enemies. Start lobbing unfounded accusations at them until you can say "See, look. These crooks are accused of so many things that they have to be dirty". Demand high profile investigations so you can keep the issue on the front page even longer. All it then takes is to cycle through a Grand Jury or two (or 3, or 4, or 5...) until you get one that agrees with you so you can indict on a crime they didn't commit, or even better, a completely different "crime" than the one you are "investigating".
Gee, it's only taken the Republicans over 6 years to figure out that these are rules of the game they are playing in. It shouldn't be a shock that they are finally deciding to take their ball and play somewhere else.
No, Armitage was the leaker - he has said so himself. And why would Libby have to lie to protect Cheney? It's 100% legal for the Vice President to discuss confidential information with is chief of staff, and Libby wasn't charged with leaking confidential information. In fact, Armitage wasn't charged either, so that puts in perspective the scope the whole investigation.
How shocking. Another hysterical left winger comes out of the woodwork to give their amateur-hour analysis. I guess they nominated you. Better luck next time.
Oh stop the pity party. The CIA requested the DOJ investigate the possibility that classified info had been leaked and that this may have constituted a crime. Fitz was appointed by the Bush Justice Dept. under Abu Gonzales to head this investigation.
You are clearly confused. Gonzales wasn't with the Justice Department at that time - he was part of the White House general council. And the only reason Fitzgerald was appointed was because Chuck Schumer whined about it. This was 100% about politics, not justice.
Libby specifically lied to the Grand Jury about his conversations, Tim Russert busted him on the stand. There was an indictment from a Grand Jury and a conviction on 4 of 5 counts, including perjury. This isn't about forgetting some dates, this is about purposefully concealing information regarding a crime. Had Libby cooperated, he would not have been charged with anything, just like Karl Rove wasn't.
Riiiiight. And the FBI agent that interviewed Russert reported that Russert "could not completely rule out the possibility that he had such an exchange" with Libby and that "he speaks to many people on a daily basis and it is difficult to reconstruct some specific conversations, particularly one which occurred several months ago". Apparently Tim's memory of the conversation somehow improved in the couple of years it took for him to get on the stand and testify. Don't worry -- no reasonable doubt here.
Again, how is this pertinent to Libby's actions that obstructed a DOJ investigation? Regardless of the verisimilitude of Joe Wilson's statements, another argument I'll kick your ass in at another time, Libby still doesn't get to obstruct investigations by the DOJ.
Riiight. Fitzgerald knew from the first day he started investigating who leaked the name, and he also knew that no law had been broken because he didn't charge the leaker. How was "justice" obstructed when the prosecutor knew there was no "justice" to obstruct from the first day of his investigation? Oh yeah, special prosecutors know that they can't run a 3 year investigation and not charge anybody. That would be such a waste!
First of all, are you this dumb or do you think/. is so dumb that everyone would miss this? How the fuck would the reporters know if Libby was leaking classified information? Do all reporters get a classified information detection kit after their Liberal indoctrination class at journalism school? Was Fitz depending on the reporters' testimony to establish the classification of the information leaked?
At least 2 reporters knew about Plame's identity before Libby or Rove said anything about it. And Libby and Rove were both asked by reporters if they had heard that Wilson's wife was involved with sending him to Africa. Add the fact that every reporter who testified in the trial admitted inconsistencies with the testimony that they gave to investigator, just as Libby admitted there were inconsistencies with his testimony. But again, inconsistent memory of minute conversations that occurred years ago are apparently only criminal if you are a Republican.
I guess it's a good thing that ole Fitz didn't charge him with leaking classified information or outing a covert op, he probably wouldn't have gotten a conviction.
You think? He could even charge the person who he knew was responsible for leaking classified information or outing a covert op. Just shows how much of a farce this whole investigation was from the very beginning, when he knew that no crime had been committed.
Who got it from a memo being circulated by the Veep's office. No one said a damn thing about A
It was my belief that leaking secret information was a high crime. The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Intelligence Identities and Protection Act of 1982 both may apply.
Revealing her identity was leaking classified information and not only ruined her career, but it endangered her entire network, any operations, any programs or projects she was working on.
Great. What does this have to do with Scooter Libby? What does it have to do with Karl Rove or Dick Cheney for that matter? The leak did not come from the White House -- it came from Armitage in the State Department, and the prosecutor knew this very early on in the investigation.
No, the LOGCAP contract that Halliburton/KBR is operating under was won under the standard, competitive bid process through the Federal Procurement system. The only thing that was "no-bid" was the extension of these contracts to include the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because those wars didn't exist when the contract was awarded. As Steven Kelman, a senior procurement policymaker in the Clinton administration, said: "One would be hard-pressed to discover anyone with a working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded -- whether a career civil servant working on procurement or an independent academic expert -- who doesn't regard these allegations as being somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd."
4) He lied about his wife's covert status. We know now from Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald that Ms. Plame had a desk job at the agency and had not been "covert" for years, and that the CIA did not deny her identity to reporters who called to confirm.
I would reply to your post, but judging from the text, it seems like you're one of the pathetically uniformed, still spouting the same crap that has been disproved time after time since 2003.
By the way, excellent use of a hybrid Straw-man + Red Herring Fallacy. I assume that if we had invaded the Sudan for humanitarian relief, you would have fully signed on to the Iraq war, right?
What? Neither Dick Cheney nor Libby testified in the trial, and their grand jury testimony is sealed. The only information that was presented in the trial was testimony from other reporters who all gave conflicting reports about the exact time and content of their conversations with Mr. Libby. There is no public testimony available that even suggests that Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney plotted to reveal the name of a covert CIA agent, and they certainly were not charged with that.
1) He lied when he claimed he was sent to Africa under the direction of VP Cheney's office. That's the whole reason reporters started digging into this in the first place because it didn't make sense that Cheney would send a war critic to verify WMD claims. It turned out that it was his wife, not Cheney, who sent him.
2) He lied when he claimed that his trip did not find any facts to support the claim that Iraq had sought Uranium from Africa. In fact, it was his testimony to the CIA that confirmed Iraq had sent an delegation to Niger for the purpose of "uranium yellowcake sales". The Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded that Wilson's trip to Niger "lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal."
3) He lied when he claimed that the identity of his wife was revealed by the White House in an effort to rebuke him for disagreeing with their war stance. We know for a fact that the identity of his wife was accidentally revealed by Richard Armitage, a State Department war critic who didn't have any motive to criminally disclose the identity of Wilson's wife.
Libby lied. Oh, but he has such a feeble mine that he can't remember or articulate even the most basic things. When it's convenient for him, he's just the biggest bumbler in history. Some people lapped it all up, and are probably holding teary candlelight vigils for the bastard. That's irrelevant. The fact is that the jury, when presented with the facts, didn't buy it.
Lied about what? Libby was NOT the leaker, and Fitzgerald knew that when he interviewed him 3 different times. I'd challenge you to remember, under oath, the exact date and content of a handful of conversations you had several years ago. Apparently if you get some dates mixed up, it's only criminal if you are a Republican.
And remember, the Jury wasn't presented with all of the facts. They were not presented with the covert status of Ms. Plame. They were not presented the identity of who actually "leaked" her role at the CIA. They were not presented with the lies her husband told to the press, and they were not presented the motivations behind the actual leaker. Nope -- they were presented with a handful of conflicting testimonies from different reporters who all agreed that Libby didn't leak any covert agents name, but disagreed about what day they actually talked to Libby on.
I'd like to see Rove and Cheney go down for this too
Of course you would. That was the clear goal from the moment this farce of an investigation was started.
the evidence implicates them pretty heavily
Implicates them with what? The leak did NOT come from the White House! It came from the State Department, from a person who disagreed with the war. The only thing the White House can be implicated on is doing a piss poor job of discrediting a critic that was spreading open lies about them that the NY Times was lapping up.
Just admit it: you've invested so much personal effort into defending Bush from any and all criticism that you're just going to take the pro-Bush stance on everything without a serious appraisal of the facts.
I'd recommend that you re-evaluate your "serious appraisal of the facts" to include, well, facts. Yours is a laughable argument considering the majority of the rabid left Bush-haters "facts" include cheering a spirited op-ed and placing a sticker on their car with a lined-out "W" on it. Wow, that sure does wonders for factual political discord, doesn't it?
If we can expect them to be loyal to profit, then we know exactly how to make them loyal to us so we can trust them to support the military. The didn't bid for those contracts just to be swell guys, you know.
The whole WMD thing never really made much sense. If Iraq actually had the capability to use WMD against the USA (e.g. destroy Manhattan) then it would have been colossally stupid to invade. The way WMD could have justified invasion was if Iraq didn't have WMD but was about to have WMD in a matter of months. The thing is, if the USA did have that level of detailed intelligence then the USA should have made the specific demand that Iraq stop that specific program.
I guess you were not paying attention to the 13 years prior to the war. Every time the UN made that specific demand, Iraq would deny it, only to be proven wrong in subsequent investigations. Oh, and if you actually read the ISG report, you would know that at the time we invaded in 2003, Iraq was 2 months away from full scale mustard production, and less than 2 years away from Sarin production.
If the Bush administration actually believed the whole "ideological war against radical Islam" thing - that corrupt dictatorships are the root of radical Islam that radical Islam is the root of terrorism against the USA, then the USA should have invaded Saudi Arabia rather than Iraq. Saudi Arabia is a brutal dictatorship closely tied to an extreme form of radical Islam. Saudi Arabia is where the 9/11 hijackers were from. Saudi Arabia is where Bin Laden was from.
So you are suggesting that instead of eliminating a brutal dictator who supported terrorism, murdered millions, invaded or attacked several sovereign states, and was in open violation of UN requirements, we should have instead attacked an ally of ours in the region just because a terrorist whom they exiled out of their country happened to be born there? Let me guess - you also favor invading New York because Timothy McVeigh was born there, right?
If the goal was to get Bin Laden or to "fight them over there so we don't fight them over here" then why didn't the Bush administration focus on the existing war in Afghanistan? For that matter, if the goal was only to choose a battle ground that resulted in few civilian casualties then why not choose Antarctica?
Do you honestly think that we stopped focusing on the war in Afghanistan?
If the Bush administration was so opposed to Saddam's record of human rights violations that they thought it justified a costly and uncertain war, then why is the Bush administration itself holding people without trial and torturing them? Along those lines, if it was just about a particular country having a bad government and needing intervention then why didn't the Bush administration invade Somalia? Or, if it's about genocide then why hasn't the USA invaded Sudan?
Holding enemy combatants without trial isn't a human rights violation, and the people that were found torturing prisoners have been severely reprimanded by law. The rest of your "two wrongs make a right" argument is complete nonsense.
At some level, I think that it would be good for Iraq to have democracy but didn't the Bush administration realize that a democratic Iraq would be dominated by the Shia who are close allies of Iran? Did the Bush administration really think it was a good idea set up a regime in Iraq that was friendly to Iran at a time when Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons?
So you would rather have the majority Shia oppressed and murdered by the minority Sunni's so you wouldn't have to worry about who they might be friends with?
It is pretty clear that at some point the world will run out of oil. If the Bush administration really cared about oil depletion it would seem to be much more effective to spend money on alternative energy research. The hundreds of billions spent on the Iraq war would have bought a lot of energy research. Even if the USA did manage to be the country that consumed the last of the oil, the oil is going to run out ev
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He was definitely one of the many reasons. Of course Cheney was trying to "sell" the invasion. Every elected official tries to sell the public on policy. In this case, the policy was to eliminate the very serious potential threat in Iraq, and the fact that they were a state sponsor of terror (and had been for nearly three decades) was clearly a justification for that.
It wasn't the justification for action, it was one of many, and it was a perfectly valid justification. You can't launch a war against global terrorism and ignore the worlds largest state sponsor of terrorism at the same time.
I would argue that option #1 is the overwhelming reason. I would say that a majority of the population wouldn't have been able to point Afghanistan out on a map before the fall of 2001 (who knows, that may still be the case today). All they knew is that Iraq was a big, bad country that we had bombed a few times in the last decade. If you go back and check, nobody in the administration came close to claiming that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks. Sure they talked about Iraq/Jund al-Islam/Zarqawi connections, Iraq's sponsoring of international terrorism, Saddam Hussein offering political asylum to Bin Laden in 1998, and 9/11 teaching us the lesson that we can't ignore these kinds of threats, but all of these points were factually correct, and were pretty darn good reasons to justify war against the regime in Iraq. I would argue that John Q. Public interpreting these points to mean that Iraq supported 9/11 says far more about Mr. Public's cognitive reasoning than it does about the Bush administration's ability to manipulate him.
IMO, you are giving the Bush administration far too much credit. I think they are much better with ideology than they are with politics, and you don't have to go any farther than the past few weeks to prove it. They have been chasing their own tail around in circles while taking an absolute public beating over the dismissal of political appointees that they had every legal and Constitutional right to let go for whatever reason. That doesn't jive with the cunning, man-behind-the-curtains portrayal that you and others are trying to float here. They just aren't that good at the politics side of DC.
Wrong. Did you even read what he said? Here is the transcript of his interview last week. I defy you to find any statement that is factually incorrect or can in any other way be considered a "lie":
Remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, an Al-Qaeda affiliate. He ran a training camp in Afghanistan for Al-Qaeda, then migrated after we went into Afghanistan and shut 'em down there, he went to Baghdad. He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the Al-Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then of course led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June. He's the guy who arranged the bombing of the Samarra mosque that precipitated the sectarian violence between Shi'a and Sunni. This is Al-Qaeda operating in Iraq, and as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq.
Note that he didn't say that Iraq and al Qaeda had a collaborative relationship, and he didn't say that the Iraqi government supported the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the US. He said that al-Zarqawi was in Iraq before we were, that he organized al Qaeda operations in Iraq before we got there, and that he precipitated sectarian violence in Iraq after we overthrew Saddam Hussein. This isn't playing "word games" - it is stating documented facts that nobody disputes.
Where do you draw the line? Do you believe in giving up your freedom to drive as fast as you can on the wrong side of the road so you won't be slightly more vulnerable to a car accident? Or would you rather pay the price by seeing car accidents all over the road so that you can have "freedom" to drive exactly how you want?
There will always be trade offs between freedom and safety which most people think are completely acceptable, which is why I find it curious that you can claim that you would rather be a victim of a terrorist attack than give up any freedoms.
A two party system is a strength, not a weakness. If you think this country has problems with leadership selected by only 55% of the voting population, how on earth to you think it would be any better if our leadership is selected by 10% or 20% of the voting population? Instead of candidates trying to appeal to the broadest base of voters, we would end up with a broad base of candidates trying to appeal to their own minority niche, and one of those minority niches will end up running everything.
Lie? Are you somehow claiming that al-Zarqawi wasn't in Iraq in 2002, and that he didn't have extensive ties to al-Qaeda? I sure hope not, because those are documented facts, and that is exactly what Cheney has said all along.
Are you confusing human rights with legal rights? The enemy combatants in Gitmo are afforded all of the basic human rights of food, shelter, medical care, and even freedom to practice their religion. But they are not given the same legal rights as US citizens. The Constitution specifically asserts this and the Supreme Court has agreed with this assertion. They have as much "essential liberty" as the Constitution directs an enemy combatant of the State to have.
Except that no essential liberties have been removed.
You have a typo. You accidentally typed "blatant evidence" when you meant to type "blatant accusations".
You're welcome.
Right. Dirty politics and unproductive partisan bickering aren't exclusive to the Democratic Party, and didn't start when George W. Bush took office. Unfortunately, that has been the tone in Washington for years.
It seems as though you are confusing the term "unprecedented" with "illegal". I suggest you open up a dictionary to figure our that those terms are not remotely synonymous.
What exactly are you claiming that Libby knew he was doing? He wasn't the source of the leak - he knew that, and the prosecutor knew that during the Grand Jury interviews. Libby had nothing to hide, so why are you claiming that he (a former lawyer, who would presumably know better) would purposefully lie in front of a Grand Jury about something he didn't do?
The answer is that he didn't lie. Sure he gave testimony that conflicted with other witnesses testimony. But the testimony of those other witnesses was also inconsistent. In fact, prosecutor star witness Tim Russert told investigators that "he speaks to many people on a daily basis and it is difficult to reconstruct some specific conversations, particularly one which occurred several months ago", so he wouldn't rule out the possibility that Libby's testimony was wrong. But apparently that kind of reasonable doubt isn't enough to acquit a Republican who is accused of lying about a crime he didn't commit.
No. Unfortunately, the way the our system works today is this: Identify your most potent political enemies. Start lobbing unfounded accusations at them until you can say "See, look. These crooks are accused of so many things that they have to be dirty". Demand high profile investigations so you can keep the issue on the front page even longer. All it then takes is to cycle through a Grand Jury or two (or 3, or 4, or 5...) until you get one that agrees with you so you can indict on a crime they didn't commit, or even better, a completely different "crime" than the one you are "investigating".
Gee, it's only taken the Republicans over 6 years to figure out that these are rules of the game they are playing in. It shouldn't be a shock that they are finally deciding to take their ball and play somewhere else.
No, Armitage was the leaker - he has said so himself. And why would Libby have to lie to protect Cheney? It's 100% legal for the Vice President to discuss confidential information with is chief of staff, and Libby wasn't charged with leaking confidential information. In fact, Armitage wasn't charged either, so that puts in perspective the scope the whole investigation.
You are clearly confused. Gonzales wasn't with the Justice Department at that time - he was part of the White House general council. And the only reason Fitzgerald was appointed was because Chuck Schumer whined about it. This was 100% about politics, not justice.
Riiiiight. And the FBI agent that interviewed Russert reported that Russert "could not completely rule out the possibility that he had such an exchange" with Libby and that "he speaks to many people on a daily basis and it is difficult to reconstruct some specific conversations, particularly one which occurred several months ago". Apparently Tim's memory of the conversation somehow improved in the couple of years it took for him to get on the stand and testify. Don't worry -- no reasonable doubt here.
Riiight. Fitzgerald knew from the first day he started investigating who leaked the name, and he also knew that no law had been broken because he didn't charge the leaker. How was "justice" obstructed when the prosecutor knew there was no "justice" to obstruct from the first day of his investigation? Oh yeah, special prosecutors know that they can't run a 3 year investigation and not charge anybody. That would be such a waste!
At least 2 reporters knew about Plame's identity before Libby or Rove said anything about it. And Libby and Rove were both asked by reporters if they had heard that Wilson's wife was involved with sending him to Africa. Add the fact that every reporter who testified in the trial admitted inconsistencies with the testimony that they gave to investigator, just as Libby admitted there were inconsistencies with his testimony. But again, inconsistent memory of minute conversations that occurred years ago are apparently only criminal if you are a Republican.
You think? He could even charge the person who he knew was responsible for leaking classified information or outing a covert op. Just shows how much of a farce this whole investigation was from the very beginning, when he knew that no crime had been committed.
Great. What does this have to do with Scooter Libby? What does it have to do with Karl Rove or Dick Cheney for that matter? The leak did not come from the White House -- it came from Armitage in the State Department, and the prosecutor knew this very early on in the investigation.
No, the LOGCAP contract that Halliburton/KBR is operating under was won under the standard, competitive bid process through the Federal Procurement system. The only thing that was "no-bid" was the extension of these contracts to include the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because those wars didn't exist when the contract was awarded. As Steven Kelman, a senior procurement policymaker in the Clinton administration, said: "One would be hard-pressed to discover anyone with a working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded -- whether a career civil servant working on procurement or an independent academic expert -- who doesn't regard these allegations as being somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd."
I forgot one more:
4) He lied about his wife's covert status. We know now from Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald that Ms. Plame had a desk job at the agency and had not been "covert" for years, and that the CIA did not deny her identity to reporters who called to confirm.
I would reply to your post, but judging from the text, it seems like you're one of the pathetically uniformed, still spouting the same crap that has been disproved time after time since 2003.
By the way, excellent use of a hybrid Straw-man + Red Herring Fallacy. I assume that if we had invaded the Sudan for humanitarian relief, you would have fully signed on to the Iraq war, right?
http://www.google.com/search?q=armitage+leak
Do you like being spoonfed?
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I could keep going, but I don't really feel like patronizing you. You do read the news, don't you?
What? Neither Dick Cheney nor Libby testified in the trial, and their grand jury testimony is sealed. The only information that was presented in the trial was testimony from other reporters who all gave conflicting reports about the exact time and content of their conversations with Mr. Libby. There is no public testimony available that even suggests that Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney plotted to reveal the name of a covert CIA agent, and they certainly were not charged with that.
1) He lied when he claimed he was sent to Africa under the direction of VP Cheney's office. That's the whole reason reporters started digging into this in the first place because it didn't make sense that Cheney would send a war critic to verify WMD claims. It turned out that it was his wife, not Cheney, who sent him.
2) He lied when he claimed that his trip did not find any facts to support the claim that Iraq had sought Uranium from Africa. In fact, it was his testimony to the CIA that confirmed Iraq had sent an delegation to Niger for the purpose of "uranium yellowcake sales". The Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded that Wilson's trip to Niger "lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal."
3) He lied when he claimed that the identity of his wife was revealed by the White House in an effort to rebuke him for disagreeing with their war stance. We know for a fact that the identity of his wife was accidentally revealed by Richard Armitage, a State Department war critic who didn't have any motive to criminally disclose the identity of Wilson's wife.
And remember, the Jury wasn't presented with all of the facts. They were not presented with the covert status of Ms. Plame. They were not presented the identity of who actually "leaked" her role at the CIA. They were not presented with the lies her husband told to the press, and they were not presented the motivations behind the actual leaker. Nope -- they were presented with a handful of conflicting testimonies from different reporters who all agreed that Libby didn't leak any covert agents name, but disagreed about what day they actually talked to Libby on.
Of course you would. That was the clear goal from the moment this farce of an investigation was started.
Implicates them with what? The leak did NOT come from the White House! It came from the State Department, from a person who disagreed with the war. The only thing the White House can be implicated on is doing a piss poor job of discrediting a critic that was spreading open lies about them that the NY Times was lapping up.
I'd recommend that you re-evaluate your "serious appraisal of the facts" to include, well, facts. Yours is a laughable argument considering the majority of the rabid left Bush-haters "facts" include cheering a spirited op-ed and placing a sticker on their car with a lined-out "W" on it. Wow, that sure does wonders for factual political discord, doesn't it?
If we can expect them to be loyal to profit, then we know exactly how to make them loyal to us so we can trust them to support the military. The didn't bid for those contracts just to be swell guys, you know.
I guess you were not paying attention to the 13 years prior to the war. Every time the UN made that specific demand, Iraq would deny it, only to be proven wrong in subsequent investigations. Oh, and if you actually read the ISG report, you would know that at the time we invaded in 2003, Iraq was 2 months away from full scale mustard production, and less than 2 years away from Sarin production.
So you are suggesting that instead of eliminating a brutal dictator who supported terrorism, murdered millions, invaded or attacked several sovereign states, and was in open violation of UN requirements, we should have instead attacked an ally of ours in the region just because a terrorist whom they exiled out of their country happened to be born there? Let me guess - you also favor invading New York because Timothy McVeigh was born there, right?
Do you honestly think that we stopped focusing on the war in Afghanistan?
Holding enemy combatants without trial isn't a human rights violation, and the people that were found torturing prisoners have been severely reprimanded by law. The rest of your "two wrongs make a right" argument is complete nonsense.
So you would rather have the majority Shia oppressed and murdered by the minority Sunni's so you wouldn't have to worry about who they might be friends with?
Why should they?