The Dish

Just because the Republican blogs are steadfastly ignoring this is a good reason to stay focused. Matt’s question remains foremost in my mind:

If there really was no crime – then it seems we ought to get some kind of explanation from Libby as to why he lied.

Quite. Or from Libby’s defenders. If you go back and read my archives on this, you’ll find I was simply puzzled from the start. None of it made much sense to me back then. In retrospect, it makes much better sense today, after all we have found out about how this administration functions. My best guess is that the explanation for Libby’s perjury is pretty obvious. For Libby and Cheney to take the risk of outing a CIA operative’s cover (and even if there was some doubt about the law and her status, it was still a risk), they must have had a very pressing reason. It may be that they were just engaged in aggressive press manipulation to keep their own story out here. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, shall we? But why so aggressive as to risk law-breaking? Why the risk for a careful lawyer like Libby? Why not just write another op-ed refuting the claims? I still have no explanation unless Libby had something major to hide and Cheney something major to fear.

Like the fact that he and Cheney knew the WMD evidence was weak, misled us, and then, busted more brutally than they ever expected, tried to cover their tracks. We can’t know this yet for sure. But it surely remains the most plausible explanation for the entire affair.

It means of course that they knowingly exaggerated the causes for war. That’s why this story still rankles, because it’s the closest the outside world has really gotten to the real nexus of decision-making on Iraq that obviously took place in Cheney’s circle. I can still just about believe that Bush thought the WMD case was sound. I can’t believe, given all that we now know, that Cheney did. He’s too smart. The data he read, we now know, was far more equivocal than the data the public was provided with. He’s not new at this. He probably never wanted to make the WMD argument anyway, put it in to appease the UN crowd, and certainly wasn’t going to query its validity. We may never know, of course, because Cheney will have destroyed the evidence, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s obvious Cheney knew all along that the WMD line was a cover, not a real threat, but realized by the summer of 2003 that any hint of this leaking (even from a two-bit blowhard like Wilson) needed swift and brutal rebuttal. They were embarrassed enough by the WMD bust, but if it was revealed that they had ignored all the caveats beforehand, it could get really dicey. One has to assume that Libby and Cheney are indistinguishable in their knowledge and involvement. Miller was also trying to cover her tracks that, in retrospect, had begun to look shady. Hence the weird Cheney-coordinated hit on Wilson and Plame. Hence Libby’s clumsy perjury. Has Libby ever done something as clumsy in his entire life? Sometimes, even the smoothest cannot escape their own lies.

That’s not just worth 30 months in jail. It’s worth impeachment. At this point, I think the weight of the evidence suggests they did all this. Maybe the deception crept in after the fact. But I know from the torture debate that they are all capable of bald-faced lies to hide embarrassment and advance their agenda. Why would they not have deliberately deceived us about WMDs before the war?

Well, it worked. I believed them. Many of you did as well. We trusted them. And they got away with it. The one man whose perjury did threaten to hold him, in some minor way, accountable has been reprieved by the man at the top of the decision-tree for war, and given every incentive not to get bitter and start talking. Is there a simpler explanation?

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

A classic:

"Will the student deferments for these fellows never end? The act reeks of cronyism. The perception is that Scooter Libby got preferential treatment, a get-out-of-jail-free card because he was chief of staff to Cheney and assistant to Bush. That perception is correct. Because of whom he knew, Scooter got preferential treatment, big-time. The Godfather took care of the consigliere.

Nothing new. After all, one recalls that the attorney who rustled up a pardon for Marc Rich from Bill Clinton was also a Beltway hustler by the name of Scooter Libby. The insiders take care of their own. And that is how the game is played in the big city."

A college contemporary dies. I never went to any of his fabulous parties, alas. I wasn’t the right sort. The Telegraph provides the best obit:

Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.

The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany’s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women’s clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous "glamour" charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly he managed only a Third in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

I love that last "perhaps". May he and all his late fellow-partiers rest in peace. Another charming obit for a dead British homosexual with less self-destructive tendencies also appeared yesterday: of the fabulous George Melly.

A new blog shepherded by Juan Cole; and a sane proposal:

Attention now needs to shift to holding back the forces unleashed in Iraq from spreading more widely. US credibility is now very limited in the region. We need to think in multilateral terms. We need to think in political and not military terms. We need to launch a political initiative along with the European Union in support of a political process led by the moderate countries of the region to do the necessary to halt the spreading cancer and to stabilise Iraq.

There are now more U.S. contractors in Iraq than actual soldiers. IraqSlogger has a helpful and balanced round-up of reports on mercenaries and private contractors in Iraq. He focuses on T. Christian Miller’s LA Times story:

Miller’s watershed piece focuses on the vast scope and scale of for profit activities in Iraq. Companies that are virtually unknown in the US are shoulder to shoulder with better-known names like KBR or L-3. What is disturbing is even the U.S. government freely admits it has no idea how many contractors are on the battlefield.

Miller’s best guess is 21,000 Americans, 43,000 foreigners and 118,000 Iraqis make up this massive work force. “Best guess” because Miller points out that

"There are also signs that even those mounting numbers may not capture the full picture. Private security contractors, who are hired to protect government officials and buildings, were not fully counted in the survey, according to industry and government officials."

Miller also points out that there is concern about the use of privatized for profit violence in the battlefield. He builds on previous articles that have highlighted alleged and egregious violations of moral conduct by individual security contractors working for companies like Blackwater, Triple Canopy and Aegis

"We don’t have control of all the coalition guns in Iraq. That’s dangerous for our country," said William Nash, a retired Army general and reconstruction expert. The Pentagon "is hiring guns. You can rationalize it all you want, but that’s obscene."

The other concern is the use of trafficked labor to perform functions once performed by U.S. soldiers and employees.

Another vent from Marty Peretz:

It was from the beginning a politically motivated case, as Dershowitz argues in this morning’s Post, the appointment of the special prosecutor, the prosecutor’s own obsessions, the case itself with the doubtful and understandably doubtful but diverse memories of many witnesses, including the defendant, the especially harsh sentence pronounced by the judge, the refusal of the appellate court to continue Libby on bail – all of these were politically motivated.

This is an argument? Marty does not provide a scintilla of evidence that any of these things was "politically motivated". Not one. How was John Ashcroft’s appointment of a special prosecutor politically motivated? What exactly are Patrick Fitzgerald’s unnamed "obsessions"? How is the sentence out of line with usual standards endorsed by the Bush Justice Department? How does Marty know that faulty memory as oposed to lying is why the jury convicted Libby of perjury? He knows none of these things. So he just repeats his assertions loudly, as if volume is a substitute for reason. It isn’t.

A reader writes:

You just posted an email from a lawyer reader that detailed his experience with Bush’s commutation standards.  He noted the three conditions that must be met (according to Gonzo) before Bush would consider commutation.  The third condition was ‘that the President would not act on any request for commutation until all judicial avenues in the case had been exhausted.’  You opined that the third condition had been met.  That is incorrect.  Libby has not exhausted all of his legal avenues.

The D.C. Circuit only ruled on his request to stay the sentence pending appeal, it did not rule on the merits of the appeal (though they did say that they saw no substantial legal issue).  Accordingly, Libby had not met any of the three conditions set forth by Gonzo.

Please do justice to this injustice and note that Libby received such special treatment that he did not have to meet any of the three conditions.

Duly noted. Get angrier.

An interesting email from a lawyer who once tried to get a commutation for a client facing the death penalty. He got nowhere, of course. From a law-blog:

On March 2003, for the first and only time in my life, I went to the West Wing of the White House. At that time, I was representing a man who was scheduled to be executed by the federal government in less than three weeks. I had filed a request for commutation, asking the President to commute the death sentence to a sentence of life without the possibility of release. Department of Justice rules require that such a request be filed with the Office of the Pardon Attorney in DOJ. Although I had filed the request in December, we had not yet received any response.

While the commutation request was pending, I asked then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales if he would meet with me to discuss the case. (I knew that the White House Counsel was ultimately responsible for making a recommendation to the President on my request.) To my great surprise, he agreed and invited me to a meeting in his office. We met for over an hour. I was allowed to present my argument in some detail, and I answered many questions from Judge Gonzales. I was quite impressed that Judge Gonzales had obviously read my written submissions and had already given the case some thought.

Judge Gonzales told me three things about President Bush’s policy in considering requests for commutation. First, that President Bush would not consider commutation if he believed that the case had already received full and fair consideration by the jury and the courts who heard the case. Second, that the President would not consider the request until he had a recommendation from the Department of Justice. Finally, he said that the President would not act on any request for commutation until all judicial avenues in the case had been exhausted.

Well, the third condition had been met for Libby. But not the other two. More evidence that this president uses his powers not to advance justice but to perpetrate a double standard of justice for his friends and lackeys. And to protect himself from scrutiny.

"Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco. … The bodies of chemical-infested, brain-dead liberal deniers continue to stack up like cordwood. … The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect," – Ted Nugent, in the WSJ. Mark Kleiman giggles here. Eric Cartman was unavailable for comment.