What does Libby know?

What are we going to do about this Libby verdict? 

Lewis Libby was found guilty of obstructing justice and lying.  Of course his attorneys will demand a new trial, and will appeal.  He will lose those appeals, because he is really and truly guilty, and the jury did a real workmanlike job of it.  But Lewis Libby is unlikely to see the inside of a Federal prison unless George W Bush leaves office without warning. 

Libby was the lawyer for Marc Rich, who was pardoned by Mr. Clinton in the last weeks of his administration, and Libby clearly knows the right things he must do to do to get a pardon.  Mr. Bush 43 knows about pardons also.  Mr. Bush famously values loyalty more than anything else, and was the chief loyalty officer for his father, Mr. Bush 41, who pardoned Caspar Weinberger.  Weinberger was convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal, and was pardoned by Mr. Bush 41, a reward for never telling anything he knew, even after he was convicted.  The loyalty was a good thing for Mr. Bush 41, who would have been exposed as a co-conspirator in that sordid affair, and it was a good thing for Mr. Weinberger, who did not really want to begin his retirement as a felon and a jailbird. 

The conspiracy that Mr. Libby was engaged in, clearly involved other people in the Bush 43 administration.   Karl Rove gave quite a lot of testimony about the way Valerie Plame became famous in Robert Novak’s column.  Each time he testified, he had no memory of giving any information about Plame to anyone, until one day, a (former) journalist told Rove about information the Special Prosecutor had, about Rove telling other people about Valerie Plame.  Rove went before the grand jury one more time, and his memory was back – he testified that he did mention Plame to several people.  In this way, Rove escaped indictment.  The Libby jury never got to read that story, so they were mystified about why Karl Rove was not on trial with Libby. 

Libby was the chief of staff to Dick Cheney, the most powerful Vice President in US history.  Clearly, Libby knows the locations of many of the Bush 43 administration’s skeletons.  Here are some of the skeletons we need to look for in the Bush closet: 

First, in order to do the work the Bush people had in mind, they had to control both houses of Congress, otherwise there would be a lot of Senate or Congressional hearings. The fact is that the Iraq invasion was invented as a solution to the threat of terrorism, in time to alter the outcome of the 2002 elections.  And it worked!  The Republicans got control of both houses of the Congress, and did not look into anything that would have been embarrassing to Mr. Bush 43. 

There are several reasons why torture is not used to get information from suspects.

First, many do not actually know anything, and second, whether they know something or not, they will say anything the torturer wants to hear, in order to stop the pain.

If the object is to get truthful, useful information, torture is not a good tool.

On the other hand, torture is the exact best way to get the story that you want, if you do not ever need to use it in a court.  The secret and totally unlawful rendition of people to countries where our people could get them tortured was not some random occurrence.  The CIA did this very dirty work in support of the Bush 43 conspiracy, and to the detriment of the United States and Mr. Libby knows all about it.  The object was to get someone, under duress, to say that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and biological weapons.  And it worked!  Oyur people got a lot of information.  The CIA complained that they got much too much information, and could not process it to verify which items were true, and which were not. 

On behalf of the United States of America, people were swept up in Iraq, and sent to Abu Graib.  Some of these people, no doubt, were bad people.  Some of these people were just ordinary people who were accused by one side or another in the Iraqi toxic politics.  Few of these people, bad or good, had anything to give us whether tortured or not.  So far, the investigations run by the Defense Department have called for prosecution of quite a lot of individuals, none with higher rank than a Sergeant.  And one officer was cashiered – Brigadier General Janice Karpinski, who had nothing at all to do with the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, although there were several Generals and several Colonels who did have authority over the interrogations.  And of course, there were CIA agents and CIA contractors, whose responsibility is known only my Donald Rumsfeld, by Cick Dheney, and by Lewis Libby.

Mr. Libby knows that the Bush 43 people cherry-picked information from the CIA.  Mr. Cheney went over there every day to lean on the actual working people at CIA headquarters.  Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney leaned on George Tenet to verify that everything they said was perfectly true.  It was trash, of course, and now everybody knows it.  Nobody knows why Mr. Tenet supported the lies.  Maybe he really liked being the Director of Central Intelligence, and he was angling to get the Medal of Freedom.  In any case, Mr. Tenet was the fig-leaf that allowed Secretary of State Powell to make his powerful, persuasive address to the United Nations, on live TV.  Now, of course, we know that it was all lies.  Mr. Powell says that he did not know at the time that it was lies.

Mr. Tenet knew, and Mr. Cheney knew, and Mr. Libby knew.

It seems like such a long time ago that Dick Cheney invited some of his friends in to hammer out an energy policy.  We have never heard who was there, and we have never heard anything about the way that policy was derived.  We never will know unless we hear about it from Lewis Libby, who certainly knows.

 

We know now that many of the contracts that became necessary because of the sudden and  un-predicted Iraq war, went to the Halliburton Company.  No-bid, open ended contracts that would have provided untold profits to Halliburton, even if they had performed exactly as specified.  Government auditors have identified some billions of dollars in money that Halliburton collected, and that we probably will never see again.  Mr. Cheney knows how those contracts were awarded.  Mr. Cheney still makes more money from Halliburton than he does from his Government salary.  And Mr. Libby knows all about that too.

 

There is such a trove of information that the United States needs to know, that is known to Lewis Libby.  Regrettably, the White House says that there are no plans for a pardon for pardon for Libby.  This is the clearest indication that a pardon is imminent.  Just recently, Mr. Bush said “I am the Decider and Don Rumsfeld is my man,” when Bush was already talking to Rumsfeld’s replacement.  And before that, “You’re doing a helluva job, Brownie” was the first step for Michael Brown to leave FEMA.

 

It is going to be very important for the Congress to get some answers, and this would be a particularly good time to ask those questions.  A Congressional hearing every week on a different aspect of the crimes committed by George W Bush, would provide the same uplift for Democrats in 2008, that the Republicans got from Monica Lewinski being on the tube every day for two years.  It is time to start those hearings – and most of them should star the well-versed Mr. Libby.  We should get them under way this week.