By Klaus Rohrich
Saturday, March 10, 2007
The persecution of Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney is likely to go down in history as the single biggest miscarriage of justice since the trial of Billy Mitchell. Here's what happened: Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald went on a fishing expedition in an effort to bring down the Vice President and maybe even the White House over the Valerie Plame affair.
Fitzgerald initiated his grand jury to "investigate" whether someone in the administration wrongfully leaked Valerie Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak, who was writing about her husband Joe Wilson's trip to Niger. Wilson was sent to Niger at the behest of the CIA to ascertain whether Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy yellowcake uranium from there for use in his weapons of mass destruction program. Upon Wilson's return he asserted that there was no evidence that Saddam was looking to purchase uranium, a claim that later was proven false by a Senate intelligence committee.
When the Novak story disclosing Valerie Plame's name broke, Wilson claimed that by making his wife's name public, her life was thus endangered, as she was a secret agent. Turns out that this was also a lie. As a result Fitzgerald launched his probe.
Federal agents questioned Libby, as well as Karl Rove, while the media were licking their chops in anticipation of seeing Rove, Cheney or even the President fall. But all that Fitzgerald was able to get was some inconsistencies between what Libby told Federal Investigators and what he told the grand jury. Hence the charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
If justice was obstructed in the Libby case, then the obstruction of justice was on the part of Patrick Fitzgerald, who knew even before he empanelled the grand jury that no one in the White House or in the Vice President's office leaked Ms Plame's name. The leak came from Richard Armitage, an Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell. Yet knowing this, Fitzgerald proceeded with the grand jury anyway, which indicates that he is more than just a little disingenuous. I'd say he is downright deceitful in using his position in the justice department to attempt to make a name for himself at the expense of someone who gave two different versions of the same non-story.
But, that's only half the travesty. The other half is about those who would use the conviction of Scooter Libby as proof that the war in Iraq was started under a false pretext. Upon hearing the news of the conviction the former mainstream media went into a sanctimonious feeding frenzy, attempting to portray it as the beginning of the end of the Bush White House and a vindication of the claim that "Bush lied; people died".
That doddering old fool, Senator Harry Reid even intimated is his public statement that the guilty verdict against Libby was proof that the war in Iraq was a sham perpetrated on the American people by the administration. Nothing could be further from the truth, is something so trivial as truth matters any more.
The conviction of Scooter Libby signifies two things: One, it means that we now live in an age where things like due process, fairness, truth and justice are sacrificed to those more important considerations, such as career enhancement and political expedience.
And two, that the Fifth Estate, which once provided a voice in the defense of rights and freedoms has become a tool of ideological interests and the only rights and freedoms with which they are concerned are their own.
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