Today the jury announced their decision : Lewis Libby is guilty of four criminal counts, and was found not guilty on one count. The prosecution said that Libby lied in order to cover up his part – and the Vice President’s part – in publicizing the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Libby was only a small part of the real crime story.
In the 1970’s, some Nixon appointees were found guilty of perjury in the Watergate cases. In those cases, the perjury was bout more than covering up the actual crime, what John Mitchell called a third-rate burglary. In that time, the real crimes of Richard Nixon involved cheating in order to win re-election in 1972. He subverted the electoral process, and chose his Democratic opponent, the one least-likely to win, Senator McGovern.
Likewise, the actual crime in this case, outing Valerie Plame, is only a small part of the web of criminal activity. The crime is about subverting American Democracy in 2002 and in 2004. The engagement in Iraq, part of President Bush’s War on Terror ™ was never about US interests. If the object had been to protect America, we would not have pulled our troops out of Afghanistan at exactly the time we could have destroyed the Al Quaeda leadership and brought Osama Bin Laden to justice.
If the object were protecting America, the airlines would have installed bulkheads to protect he pilot cabin, and the FAA would have had a protocol telling the pilots NOT to permit hijackers into that cabin, even if the hijackers started to kill passengers and cabin crew.
Some of the cover up still exists: We have a no-fly list that cannot be made more accurate. We inspect every person before they get on an aircraft. We do not permit a four ounce toothpaste tube in carry-on bags. We inspect all checked luggage, after the flight lands, with agents rummaging through the contents (not before takeoff, which would actually protect the flight). Nobody can lock a bag any more, and if we have to accept a high level of theft from baggage by the team hired to make us safe, it is just the price we pay for Freedom. It is all part of a program to make us feel less safe.
The cover up is not only about National Security. Senator Arlen Spector, who claims to oppose the Bush Administration, slipped a wonderfully wicked detail into the Patriot Act. Now, if a US Attorney is fired for any reason, the President can name a new US Attorney who does not require Senate confirmation. Nobody seems to have notice this until recently, when a few US Attorneys had the integrity to go after Republican Members of Congress for criminal violations, and they declined to go after cases that were clearly political hack-jobs. These US Attorneys, who were good enough Republicans for George W Bush to appoint, all became failures, and had to be replaced, last week. It is very important at this point in Mr. Bush’s career that all of his US Attorneys be personally loyal more than dedicated to their job and to the United States.
In an ordinary mob prosecution, this would be the time that the defendant would start to feel pressure to turn on his bosses, in order to get a reduced sentence. Normally this would be very important to Lewis Libby, as his sentence could be more than twenty years in a federal prison. But this is not a normal case.
About twenty years ago, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was found guilty of a similar violation of the law, covering up the Iran-Contra scandal. If Weinberger had turned, any number of Ronald Reagan’s people would have been in serious jeopardy. The Defense Secretary never did feel the pressure, however, as he was pardoned by President George H W Bush.
It is going to be very difficult to expose the extent of the current scandal, which might be described accurately as a great right wing conspiracy, if Lewis Libby is pardoned by President George W Bush.
