[Dialogue] Begging His Pardon

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Saturday, June 16, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
<http://www.commondreams.org>  

Begging His Pardon

by Bill Moyers

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 in 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-throw-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 the 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 night on PBS. This essay appears on
tonight's program. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at
www.pbs.org/moyers.

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/16/1926/

 

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