How nice that the media is taking notice of the corruption of the Bush administration at last — they’re not a liberal media as the conservatives would have you believe; but they are simply quick to pounce on any event or person that has some element of crime or pain.
Anyway. I’m not gonna talk the whole Plamegate thing to death, partly because it’s been made so complicated that I can’t quite figure out what’s going on; secondly because everyone else is covering it.
I do want to point out one thing that seems obvious to me: if it was Cheney who told LIbby about Plame, then isn’t it obvious that Cheney — the architect of the whole Iraq boondoggle — gave Libby his marching orders?
Now here’s one significant omission: no indictments on the actual leak itself, the naming of a covert operative. What’s up with that?
Meanwhile, this “Situation Room” format on CNN is rather annoying. We already have too much stuff scrolling, blinking, and rotating on the screen. Now we have a dozen screens in the background as well, and it’s all too much. Plus, while Wolf Blitzer is blathering, you can clearly see a news conference going on at the Justice department on one of the screens — but they don’t go to it, they just keep letting blowhards talk about it, including one guy who keeps hammering home “innocent until proven guilty” and that perjury is not that bad. Thankfully, the guy next to him pointed out that it would have been nice to hear the same platitudes from him back during the Clinton scandal.
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“Now here’s one significant omission: no indictments on the actual leak itself, the naming of a covert operative. What’s up with that?”
That charge is much harder to prove.
They have to prove the outer KNEW she was a covert agent.
Proving they knew she was covert is much harder than proving they are lieing bastards, that was easy.
It may not be as difficult to prove as we think:
–snip–
Josh Marshall notes:
On or about June 12, 2003, LIBBY was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson’s wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Divison. LIBBY understood that the Vice President had learned this information from the CIA.
This is a crucial piece of information. The Counterproliferation Division (CPD) is part of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, i.e., not the Directorate of Intelligence, the branch of the CIA where ‘analysts’ come from, but the DO, where the spies, the ‘operatives’, come from.
Libby’s a long time national security hand. He knows exactly what CPD is and where it is. So does Cheney. They both knew. It’s right there in the indictment.
Of course, if it could be proven that Cheney told Libby the classified information so that Libby could then use that information to discredit a critic of his Iraq plan, well, that certainly seems like it would be illegal — although, incredibly difficult to prove. I wonder if Cheney has already come up with a story explaining why he told Libby this classified bit of info? What reason would he have to relay that? I mean, “need to know”?
I’m not certain, but I think that Cheney didn’t commit a crime because Libby has enough security clearance to legally know that she was an operative. Same goes for Rove I assume.
Libby telling reporters and Rove (Source A) telling Novak, would be where the violation of security actually occurred, I would think. But for some reason — like the Martha Stewart conviction where she was charged with lying about her stock trade, not the actual trade — Libby is being charged with lying about his leaking, not for the leaking itself.
What nauseates me is how they all say that Libby has to be presumed innocent and has a right to due process — a right this administration wants to deny to people held at Gitmo, and even other American citizens.