By Bill Moyers
Begging His Pardon
Sat Jun 1,
2007
Begging His Pardon
By Bill Moyers
t r u t h o u t | Guest Columnist
Friday 15 June 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061507R.shtml
We have yet another remarkable revelation of the mindset of Washington's ruling clique of neoconservative elites - the people who took us to war from the safety of their Beltway bunkers. Even as Iraq grows bloodier by the day, their passion of the week is to keep one of their own from going to jail.
It is well-known that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby - once Vice President Cheney's most trusted adviser - has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury. Lying. Not a white lie, mind you. A killer lie. Scooter Libby deliberately poured poison into the drinking water of democracy by lying to federal investigators, for the purpose of obstructing justice.
Attempting to trash critics of the war, Libby and his pals in high places - including his boss Dick Cheney - outed a covert CIA agent. Libby then lied to cover their tracks. To throw investigators off the trail, he kicked sand into the eyes of truth. "Libby lied about nearly everything that mattered," wrote the chief prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. The jury agreed and found him guilty on four felony counts. Judge Reggie B. Walton - a no-nonsense, lock-em-up-and-toss-away-the-key type, appointed to the bench by none other than George W. Bush - called the evidence "overwhelming" and threw the book at Libby.
You would have thought their man had been ordered to Guantanamo, so intense was the reaction from his cheerleaders. They flooded the judge's chambers with letters of support for their comrade and took to the airwaves in a campaign to "free Scooter."
Vice President Cheney issued a statement praising Libby as "a man ... of personal integrity" - without even a hint of irony about their collusion to browbeat the CIA into mangling intelligence about Iraq in order to justify the invasion.
"A patriot, a dedicated public servant, a strong family man, and a tireless, honorable, selfless human being," said Donald Rumsfeld - the very same Rumsfeld who had claimed to know the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction and who boasted of "bulletproof" evidence linking Saddam to 9/11. "A good person" and "decent man," said one-time Pentagon adviser Kenneth Adelman, who had predicted the war in Iraq would be a "cakewalk." Paul Wolfowitz wrote a four-page letter to praise "the noblest spirit of selfless service" that he knew motivated his friend Scooter. Yes, that Paul Wolfowitz, who had claimed Iraqis would "greet us as liberators" and that Iraq would "finance its own reconstruction." The same Paul Wolfowitz who had to resign recently as president of the World Bank for using his office to show favoritism to his girlfriend. Paul Wolfowitz turned character witness.
The praise kept coming: from Douglas Feith, who ran the Pentagon factory of disinformation that Cheney and Libby used to brainwash the press; from Richard Perle, as cocksure about Libby's "honesty, integrity, fairness and balance" as he had been about the success of the war; and from William Kristol, who had primed the pump of the propaganda machine at The Weekly Standard and has led the call for a presidential pardon. "The case was such a farce, in my view," he said. "I'm for pardon on the merits."
One Beltway insider reports that the entire community is grieving - "weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness" of Libby's sentence.
And there's the rub.
None seem the least weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness of sentencing soldiers to repeated and longer tours of duty in a war induced by deception. It was left to the hawkish academic Fouad Ajami to state the matter baldly. In a piece published on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, Ajami pleaded with Bush to pardon Libby. For believing "in the nobility of this war," wrote Ajami, Scooter Libby had himself become a "casualty" - a fallen soldier the president dare not leave behind on the Beltway battlefield.
Not a word in the entire article about the real fallen soldiers. The honest-to-God dead, and dying, and wounded. Not a word about the chaos or the cost. Even as the calamity they created worsens, all they can muster is a cry for leniency for one of their own who lied to cover their tracks.
There are contrarian voices: "This is an open-and-shut case of perjury and obstruction of justice," said Pat Buchanan. "The Republican Party stands for the idea that high officials should not be lying to special investigators." From the former governor of Virginia, James Gilmore, a staunch conservative, comes this verdict: "If the public believes there's one law for a certain group of people in high places and another law for regular people, then you will destroy the law and destroy the system."
So it may well be, as The Hartford Courant said editorially, that Mr Libby is "a nice guy, a loyal and devoted patriot ... but none of that excuses perjury or obstruction of justice. If it did, truth wouldn't matter much."
Bill Moyers is managing editor of the weekly public affairs program "Bill Moyers Journal," which airs Friday nights on PBS. This essay appears on tonight's program.
-------
ill Moyers discusses the support for Libby shown by Washington's ruling elite; F-16 crashes; five soldiers killed in Iraq; an Iraqi father's desire to protect his child; population of America's well-known birds in a tailspin; Clean Water Act used in ruling against mountaintop mining; Yes Men shock oil industry conference; new business model results in free medicine for AIDS patients; Army overwhelmed by increase in mental health disorders; and more ... Browse our continually updating front page at http://www.truthout.org
t r u t h o u t | 06.15
Go directly to our issues page: http://www.truthout.org/issues.shtml
American Fighter Down in Iraq
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061507S.shtml
An F-16 fighter jet crashed Friday in Iraq, the Air Force reported, in the first such loss in more than six months. Separately, the US military announced the deaths of five American soldiers.
Cole Miller | Father's Day For Peace
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061507T.shtml
In recognition of Father's Day, Brave New Films made a brief video about Ismaeel Hussein and his nine-year-old son, Abdul Hakeem Khalaf. Abdul was disfigured when US mortar rounds struck his home during the April 2004 attack on Fallujah. Doctors at a small clinic were able to save the boy's life, but his father had begun a journey in search of someone who could repair the damage to his son's face.
Common Bird Species in Dramatic Decline
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507EA.shtml
New data show the populations of some of America's well-known birds in a tailspin, thanks to the one-two punch of habitat fragmentation and, increasingly, global warming.
Judge Rules Against Mountaintop Mining
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507EB.shtml
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that using settling ponds to remove sediment from streams at mountaintop removal coal mines violates the Clean Water Act.
Biofuels Could Lead to Mass Hunger Deaths
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507EC.shtml
Diverting sugar and maize for biofuels could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths from hunger worldwide, the United Nations' food envoy warned on Thursday.
Yes Men Shock Oil Industry Conference
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507ED.shtml
Activists from the political trickster collective the Yes Men used the Gas and Oil Exposition in Calgary, Alberta, to stage their latest theater of corporate absurdity.
Vatican Cardinal Calls on Catholics to Stop Funding Amnesty
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507WA.shtml
A senior Vatican cardinal said yesterday that Catholics should stop donating to human rights group Amnesty International because of its new policy advocating abortion rights for women if they had been raped, were a victim of incest or faced health risks.
The Lazarus Effect
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507HA.shtml
Foundations such as the Global Fund, which began distributing free ARVs in Rwanda in 2004, gets most of its financing from world governments, but a growing proportion comes from an altogether unlikely set of benefactors: Western retailers and the shoppers who can't resist them.
Army Addresses Overwhelming Increases in PTSD
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507HB.shtml
Overwhelmed by the number of soldiers returning from war with mental problems, the Army is planning to hire at least 25 percent more psychiatrists. Long and repeat deployments caused by extended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are causing more mental strain on troops, says Elspeth Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general.
VIDEO | Kokesh to Marines: "This Is Not Going Away"
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061407S.shtml
The Marine Corps is removing Adam Kokesh from the Individual Ready Reserve just days before his military commitment would have expired. He will be receiving a "general" discharge, which is less than he received last November when leaving active duty. Truthout's Geoffrey Millard and Scott Galindez followed Kokesh from a press conference in Washington, DC on June 1, to his hearing in Kansas City, Missouri on June 4. Stay tuned for interviews with Adam Kokesh and Liam Madden, who is facing similar action.
VIDEO | Jason Leopold: My Interview With Mikey Weinstein
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061407A.shtml
Jason Leopold reports: "More than two years ago, Mikey Weinstein launched the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit government watchdog group that aims to keep a close eye on the military to ensure its adherence to the law mandating the separation between church and state, after his son, a student at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was harassed about his Jewish faith and urged by other cadets and Air Force officials to convert to Christianity."
VIDEO | Jason Leopold Interview With Fired US Attorney John McKay
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061207J.shtml
In a wide-ranging, exclusive interview with Truthout, John McKay, the US attorney for western Washington state, who was fired in December, said he believes he was ousted because he did not convene a federal grand jury to pursue allegations of voter fraud related to the 2004 governor's election in the state in which Democrat Christine Gregoire defeated Republican Dino Rossi by a margin of 159 votes.
Go directly to our issues page: http://www.truthout.org/issues.shtml
By Bill Moyers
t r u t h o u t | Guest Columnist
Friday 15 June 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061507R.shtml
We have yet another remarkable revelation of the mindset of Washington's ruling clique of neoconservative elites - the people who took us to war from the safety of their Beltway bunkers. Even as Iraq grows bloodier by the day, their passion of the week is to keep one of their own from going to jail.
It is well-known that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby - once Vice President Cheney's most trusted adviser - has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury. Lying. Not a white lie, mind you. A killer lie. Scooter Libby deliberately poured poison into the drinking water of democracy by lying to federal investigators, for the purpose of obstructing justice.
Attempting to trash critics of the war, Libby and his pals in high places - including his boss Dick Cheney - outed a covert CIA agent. Libby then lied to cover their tracks. To throw investigators off the trail, he kicked sand into the eyes of truth. "Libby lied about nearly everything that mattered," wrote the chief prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. The jury agreed and found him guilty on four felony counts. Judge Reggie B. Walton - a no-nonsense, lock-em-up-and-toss-away-the-key type, appointed to the bench by none other than George W. Bush - called the evidence "overwhelming" and threw the book at Libby.
You would have thought their man had been ordered to Guantanamo, so intense was the reaction from his cheerleaders. They flooded the judge's chambers with letters of support for their comrade and took to the airwaves in a campaign to "free Scooter."
Vice President Cheney issued a statement praising Libby as "a man ... of personal integrity" - without even a hint of irony about their collusion to browbeat the CIA into mangling intelligence about Iraq in order to justify the invasion.
"A patriot, a dedicated public servant, a strong family man, and a tireless, honorable, selfless human being," said Donald Rumsfeld - the very same Rumsfeld who had claimed to know the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction and who boasted of "bulletproof" evidence linking Saddam to 9/11. "A good person" and "decent man," said one-time Pentagon adviser Kenneth Adelman, who had predicted the war in Iraq would be a "cakewalk." Paul Wolfowitz wrote a four-page letter to praise "the noblest spirit of selfless service" that he knew motivated his friend Scooter. Yes, that Paul Wolfowitz, who had claimed Iraqis would "greet us as liberators" and that Iraq would "finance its own reconstruction." The same Paul Wolfowitz who had to resign recently as president of the World Bank for using his office to show favoritism to his girlfriend. Paul Wolfowitz turned character witness.
The praise kept coming: from Douglas Feith, who ran the Pentagon factory of disinformation that Cheney and Libby used to brainwash the press; from Richard Perle, as cocksure about Libby's "honesty, integrity, fairness and balance" as he had been about the success of the war; and from William Kristol, who had primed the pump of the propaganda machine at The Weekly Standard and has led the call for a presidential pardon. "The case was such a farce, in my view," he said. "I'm for pardon on the merits."
One Beltway insider reports that the entire community is grieving - "weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness" of Libby's sentence.
And there's the rub.
None seem the least weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness of sentencing soldiers to repeated and longer tours of duty in a war induced by deception. It was left to the hawkish academic Fouad Ajami to state the matter baldly. In a piece published on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, Ajami pleaded with Bush to pardon Libby. For believing "in the nobility of this war," wrote Ajami, Scooter Libby had himself become a "casualty" - a fallen soldier the president dare not leave behind on the Beltway battlefield.
Not a word in the entire article about the real fallen soldiers. The honest-to-God dead, and dying, and wounded. Not a word about the chaos or the cost. Even as the calamity they created worsens, all they can muster is a cry for leniency for one of their own who lied to cover their tracks.
There are contrarian voices: "This is an open-and-shut case of perjury and obstruction of justice," said Pat Buchanan. "The Republican Party stands for the idea that high officials should not be lying to special investigators." From the former governor of Virginia, James Gilmore, a staunch conservative, comes this verdict: "If the public believes there's one law for a certain group of people in high places and another law for regular people, then you will destroy the law and destroy the system."
So it may well be, as The Hartford Courant said editorially, that Mr Libby is "a nice guy, a loyal and devoted patriot ... but none of that excuses perjury or obstruction of justice. If it did, truth wouldn't matter much."
Bill Moyers is managing editor of the weekly public affairs program "Bill Moyers Journal," which airs Friday nights on PBS. This essay appears on tonight's program.
-------
ill Moyers discusses the support for Libby shown by Washington's ruling elite; F-16 crashes; five soldiers killed in Iraq; an Iraqi father's desire to protect his child; population of America's well-known birds in a tailspin; Clean Water Act used in ruling against mountaintop mining; Yes Men shock oil industry conference; new business model results in free medicine for AIDS patients; Army overwhelmed by increase in mental health disorders; and more ... Browse our continually updating front page at http://www.truthout.org
t r u t h o u t | 06.15
Go directly to our issues page: http://www.truthout.org/issues.shtml
American Fighter Down in Iraq
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061507S.shtml
An F-16 fighter jet crashed Friday in Iraq, the Air Force reported, in the first such loss in more than six months. Separately, the US military announced the deaths of five American soldiers.
Cole Miller | Father's Day For Peace
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061507T.shtml
In recognition of Father's Day, Brave New Films made a brief video about Ismaeel Hussein and his nine-year-old son, Abdul Hakeem Khalaf. Abdul was disfigured when US mortar rounds struck his home during the April 2004 attack on Fallujah. Doctors at a small clinic were able to save the boy's life, but his father had begun a journey in search of someone who could repair the damage to his son's face.
Common Bird Species in Dramatic Decline
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507EA.shtml
New data show the populations of some of America's well-known birds in a tailspin, thanks to the one-two punch of habitat fragmentation and, increasingly, global warming.
Judge Rules Against Mountaintop Mining
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507EB.shtml
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that using settling ponds to remove sediment from streams at mountaintop removal coal mines violates the Clean Water Act.
Biofuels Could Lead to Mass Hunger Deaths
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507EC.shtml
Diverting sugar and maize for biofuels could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths from hunger worldwide, the United Nations' food envoy warned on Thursday.
Yes Men Shock Oil Industry Conference
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507ED.shtml
Activists from the political trickster collective the Yes Men used the Gas and Oil Exposition in Calgary, Alberta, to stage their latest theater of corporate absurdity.
Vatican Cardinal Calls on Catholics to Stop Funding Amnesty
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507WA.shtml
A senior Vatican cardinal said yesterday that Catholics should stop donating to human rights group Amnesty International because of its new policy advocating abortion rights for women if they had been raped, were a victim of incest or faced health risks.
The Lazarus Effect
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507HA.shtml
Foundations such as the Global Fund, which began distributing free ARVs in Rwanda in 2004, gets most of its financing from world governments, but a growing proportion comes from an altogether unlikely set of benefactors: Western retailers and the shoppers who can't resist them.
Army Addresses Overwhelming Increases in PTSD
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061507HB.shtml
Overwhelmed by the number of soldiers returning from war with mental problems, the Army is planning to hire at least 25 percent more psychiatrists. Long and repeat deployments caused by extended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are causing more mental strain on troops, says Elspeth Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general.
VIDEO | Kokesh to Marines: "This Is Not Going Away"
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061407S.shtml
The Marine Corps is removing Adam Kokesh from the Individual Ready Reserve just days before his military commitment would have expired. He will be receiving a "general" discharge, which is less than he received last November when leaving active duty. Truthout's Geoffrey Millard and Scott Galindez followed Kokesh from a press conference in Washington, DC on June 1, to his hearing in Kansas City, Missouri on June 4. Stay tuned for interviews with Adam Kokesh and Liam Madden, who is facing similar action.
VIDEO | Jason Leopold: My Interview With Mikey Weinstein
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061407A.shtml
Jason Leopold reports: "More than two years ago, Mikey Weinstein launched the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit government watchdog group that aims to keep a close eye on the military to ensure its adherence to the law mandating the separation between church and state, after his son, a student at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was harassed about his Jewish faith and urged by other cadets and Air Force officials to convert to Christianity."
VIDEO | Jason Leopold Interview With Fired US Attorney John McKay
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061207J.shtml
In a wide-ranging, exclusive interview with Truthout, John McKay, the US attorney for western Washington state, who was fired in December, said he believes he was ousted because he did not convene a federal grand jury to pursue allegations of voter fraud related to the 2004 governor's election in the state in which Democrat Christine Gregoire defeated Republican Dino Rossi by a margin of 159 votes.
Go directly to our issues page: http://www.truthout.org/issues.shtml
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