[Dialogue] Libby Said to Concoct Story in Leak Case

[Harry Wainwright]

Colleagues, here is an article that you might find useful. Peace, Harry 
  _____  


MichaelMoore.com

Latest News

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=4709

October 29th, 2005 5:03 pm

Libby Said to Concoct Story in Leak Case

By Larry Margasak and Pete Yost / Associated
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051029/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cia_leak_reconstruction;
_ylt=AhI3xH_lnlbkKkYR6hcrrA6s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ-->  Press

The prosecution's conclusion: Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff
zealously pursued information about a critic who said the Bush
administration manipulated intelligence to make the case for war. 

The view of the president and vice president: I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is a
dedicated public servant who has worked tirelessly on behalf of his country.


Is Libby an influential White House adviser who lied? Or is he a man with a
hectic schedule who happens to remember events differently from the
reporters and administration figures who will eventually be called to
testify against him? 

"As lawyers, we recognize that a person's recollection and memory of events
will not always match those of other people, particularly when they are
asked to testify months after the events occurred," Libby's lawyer, Joseph
Tate, said in a statement. 

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald drew his detailed portrait of Libby based
on a two-year investigation that pulled dozens of witnesses in for
questioning, including President Bush and Cheney. 

Libby, the indictment against him concludes, received information from
Cheney, the State Department and the CIA about covert CIA officer Valerie
Plame, whose husband was attacking an administration unable to find any
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Libby then spread the information to
reporters and later concocted a story that his information had come from
reporters, the indictment says. 

The other portrait of Libby, the favorable version, shows a deeply committed
conservative who has been a player on the Washington scene since the early
days of the Reagan administration. 

Libby left the White House for the last time Friday, departing after seeing
some of the ideas he and others championed become administration policy. 

In 1992, Libby and former Pentagon deputy Paul Wolfowitz wrote a paper
favoring the use of pre-emptive force to prevent countries from developing
weapons of mass destruction. The paper later won praise from the
neoconservative Project for the New American Century, which called it "a
blueprint for maintaining U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great
power rival." 

Notwithstanding Fitzgerald's insistence Friday that the criminal case is not
about Iraq, he probably will seek to cast Libby as an architect of the
U.S.-led invasion, said Scott Fredericksen, a former prosecutor who now
represents white-collar defendants. 

The prosecution will call Libby "a very bright guy at the highest levels of
government with motivation to prevent Fitzgerald and the grand jury from
learning the true source" of Libby's information about administration critic
Joseph Wilson. 

After the indictment, Cheney issued words of praise in Washington but made
no mention of his departing chief of staff on a trip later in the day to
Robins Air Force Base in Georgia. Cheney's speech to base personnel was on
terrorism, the topic that, along with Iraq, has consumed his and Libby's
time and energy. 

"This is nothing new for a White House having to counter its critics,
particularly when the administration believes the criticism to be false,"
said Washington lawyer Michael Madigan, a former Republican counsel in the
Senate investigation of Clinton-era campaign fund-raising abuses. "The
trouble the White House encountered in this case is that some of the
information was classified." 

If he were representing Libby, lawyer David Schertler said he would present
character witnesses to testify about Libby's dedication to public service. 

"This guy, every day, deals with some of the most important issues facing
the American people," said Schertler, a former federal prosecutor. "You're
asking him to recollect conversations, some fairly short, and he's giving
his best recollections. Maybe he didn't remember correctly, but he didn't
have the intent to deceive the special prosecutor or grand jury." 

Fitzgerald's probe initially sought to determine whether anyone in the
administration violated the law by knowingly disclosing the identity of a
covert CIA employee. 

"You didn't have that, so why did you charge him?" Schertler suggested
Libby's defense would assert. 

Fitzgerald spent 22 months on the investigation at a cost of more than $1
million. In the end, Libby was charged with five felonies alleging
obstruction of justice, perjury to a grand jury and making false statements
to FBI agents. If convicted, he could face a maximum of 30 years in prison
and $1.25 million in fines. 

The starting point was Bush's claim in his State of the Union address in
January 2003 that Saddam Hussein had tried to acquire uranium from the
African nation of Niger as part of an effort to develop weapons of mass
destruction. 

Bush took the country to war with Iraq in March 2003, saying Saddam's banned
weapons program threatened the U.S. When no such weapons turned up, the
administration was put on the defensive. 

Wilson, a former ambassador, had gone to Niger in 2002 for the CIA to
investigate the uranium claim. He found no evidence to back up an allegation
of a sales agreement between Iraq and Niger. Wilson's wife, Plame, was the
covert CIA officer whose name was leaked in July 2003 as the debate about
the war heated up. 

The indictment alleges Libby had information from at least seven government
officials, including the vice president, about Plame and her CIA status.
Libby said he heard it first from reporters. The indictment said Libby
spread the information to the media. 

Fitzgerald summed up the charges: 

"At the end of the day what appears is that Mr. Libby's story that he was at
the tail end of a chain of phone calls, passing on from one reporter what he
heard from another, was not true. It was false. He was at the beginning of
the chain of phone calls, the first official to disclose this information
outside the government to a reporter. And then he lied about it afterward,
under oath and repeatedly." 

Libby's case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton,
nominated by Bush in 2001.

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20051029/405c0a3d/attachment.htm