Nice job with this

nelle2nelle — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 17:44:05 -0500

Nice job with this subject...

it really is astounding to see some of the parallels with 1974. It's not identical by any means, but some of the same underlying issues are present - paranoia, revenge, a view of presidential power as limitless... but this time around there was an element of blindly adhering to an ideology which also believes our military is at their disposal to do anything. Here we are, untold Iraqis dead, 2,300 plus Americans, almost 500 billion spent on the war.

What was that you said, Mr. President? We cannot afford health care for all? An improved educational system?

*fingers crossed for this November*

Nelle

White House in the Legal Hot-Seat?

stacyb — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 09:20:21 -0500

Yes, they are actually.

The Scooter Libby/Plamegate case has heated up in the last week, as special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald filed pleadings that seem to implicate the Executive Branch in the scandal. This raises a couple of important questions, tantamount among them is whether the President and/or Vice President lied to the prosecutor when they were originally questioned by him about their knowledge of the leak of the identity of covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame Wilson.

***
The Washington Post had this to say about the case:

As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick J.
Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" -- using classified information
-- to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq.

Bluntly and repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Citing grand jury testimony from the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald fingered Cheney
as the first to voice a line of attack that at least three White House officials would soon deploy against former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

It seems inevitable that if this eventually comes to trial, Dick Cheney will end up on the witness stand, and that could be embarrassing for the administration.

But it wasn't just Cheney who occupied the hot seat this past week:

The revelation that President Bush authorized former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to divulge classified information about Iraq fits a pattern of selective leaks of secret intelligence to further the administration's political agenda.

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials have reacted angrily at unauthorized leaks, such as the exposure of a domestic
wiretapping program and a network of secret CIA prisons, both of which are now the subject of far-reaching investigations.

But secret information that supports their policies, particularly about the Iraq war, has surfaced everywhere from the U.N. Security
Council to major newspapers and magazines. Much of the information that the administration leaked or declassified, however, has proved to
be incomplete, exaggerated, incorrect or fabricated.

Ok, so this raises more uncomfortable issues for the White House to deal with- did Bush lie to Congress when he went to them requesting the authorization for war? Lying to Congress is no small matter, particularly when it concerns something as grave as waging war. So far, the media has virtually ignored this legal question and its implications.

Another issue is did Bush follow the correct declassification procedures when he selectively declassified parts of the NIE which supported his case for war (while keeping those parts that didn't, classified)?

No one is claiming that Bush doesn't have the ability to declassify such information, but the question of why he did so and how

he did so, are relevant in determining abuse of executive privilege. In other words, if he did it in furtherance of a political scheme to smear Ambassador Joe Wilson, that is extrememly problematic. If he did it to mislead the American people about the threat Saddam posed to the United States, that is also problematic.

TruthOut puts it this way:

Now that President Bush's knowledge of the Plame Wilson affair hasbeen exposed, there are thorny questions about whether the president
has broken the law - specifically, whether he obstructed justice when he was interviewed about his knowledge of the Plame Wilson leak andthe campaign to discredit her husband.

Details of President Bush's involvement in the Plame Wilson affair came in a 39-page court document filed by Fitzgerald late Wednesday
evening in US District Court in Washington.

Fitzgerald's court filing was made in response to attorneys representing I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's
former chief of staff, who was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators for not telling the
grand jury he spoke to reporters about Plame Wilson...

[snip]

...The attorneys and officials close to the case said over the weekend that the hastily arranged meeting was called by Cheney to
"brief the president" on Wilson's increasing public criticism about the White House's use of the Niger intelligence and the negative
impact it would eventually have on the administration's credibility if the public and Congress found out it was true, the sources said.

Bush said publicly in October 2003 that he had no idea who was responsible for unmasking Plame Wilson to columnist Robert Novak and other reporters. The president said that he welcomed a Justice Department investigation to find out who was responsible for it.

But neither Bush nor anyone in his inner circle let on that just four months earlier, they had agreed to launch a full-scale campaign
to undercut Wilson's credibility by planting negative stories about his personal life with the media.

Some blogs, in particular Firedoglake and the legal blog, Talk Left(two blogs where resident lawyers analyze all the filings in the Plame case in exhaustive detail), believe that the latest flurry of filings from Scooter Libby are meant to achieve one thing- a presidential pardon for Libby.

Libby is holding all the cards right now and his latest filings could be a warning shot across the administration's bow- a way of saying, "I can hurt you unless you do something for me." The fact that Bush isn't up for re-election could make this a real possibility as he wouldn't have to deal with the political fallout for issuing such a politically-motivated pardon. But the GOP would likely suffer politically as a result.

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Nice job with this

White House in the Legal Hot-Seat?