Bush's Personal Goon Squad

As raised here, in Paul Krugman's op/ed in The Times on Monday, and throughout hundreds if not thousands of blog entries around the blogosphere, virtually no one is surprised by the revelations that Bush and his henchhog, Karl Rove, have basically used U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the entire (In)Justice Department as their personal goon squad: wiping out any federal prosecutor who would not bend to their will, who refused to "invent" indictments against Democrats (not that Dems don't engage in bad behavior, mind you, but it's clear the Bushies and Republicans were willing to resort to fiction here) or continued - damn them! - to investigate the many abuses by Republicans who took their Congressional majority as a license to loot and plunder and rape American laws, American taxpayers, and whoever else they could.

But we need not only to look long and hard at what the Bushies did with these fired federal prosecutors - and what Scooter Libby and his pals did to CIA covert operative Valerie Plame - but also beyond to the many other means and agencies have been called upon to serve the dark masters of the Bush Administration. Agencies like the IRS (whose mandate to go after ever smaller taxpayers often means creating fear in such taxpayers to speak out) and others. I suspect we'd be bowled-over by what they find even if they just rub a tiny bit at the surface. After all, the Bushies have been so certain of their "mandate" that they rarely have bothered to hide their tracks well, since they felt assured they were in control of those who would investigate.

Neat trick.

"Moment of Accountability" For Bush, Cheney, And Their Lies?

In this piece in the Washington Post, the analyst writer Peter Baker proclaims the Bushies are at a moment of accountability. But just calling it accountability means nothing unless some decisive action is taken, not just in light of the multiple Scooter Libby guilty verdicts in the PlameGate trial yesterday but the mountain of other lies and corrupt acts this administration has committed.

So let me turn away from the first Post piece and turn instead to Dan Froomkin's blog at WaPo which speaks more powerfully, yet will also probably be met with nothing but silence OR derision from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:

It's time for President Bush and Vice President Cheney to come clean about their roles in the White House's outing of a CIA agent and the ensuing cover-up.

It's actually long past time. But with former vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby's conviction on charges of perjury and obstruction yesterday, the stench of corruption has taken formal residence at the White House.

The president and vice president can pretend it's not there, and can continue to hide behind their weak and transparent excuse for not commenting on an "ongoing criminal investigation".

But the trial is over. The investigation is over. And the conviction of a liar in their midst has made it more imperative than ever that the leaders of this country fully address the American people's legitimate concerns that the lies in question were intended to hide from public view even deeper skullduggery at the highest levels of the administration.

As special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald noted in his closing arguments (see my Feb. 21 column, The Cloud Over Cheney) Libby's lies have left all sorts of issues unresolved.

Cheney was at the fevered center of the effort to discredit administration critic Joseph Wilson, which resulted in the exposure of his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative. Indeed, Cheney was the first person to tell Libby about Plame. Cheney authored talking points that quite possibly encouraged Libby and others to mention Plame to reporters. Cheney was the only person to whom Libby confided his implausible cover story -- that he had first heard about Plame from NBC's Tim Russert. And at Cheney's request, Bush secretly declassified portions of a National Intelligence Reports so that Libby could leak them to Judith Miller of the New York Times.

The White House yesterday once again trotted out its "ongoing criminal matter" rationale. But that was never much of an excuse and at this point it is utterly pathetic. Any danger of influencing the investigation or the jury pool, to the extent that was ever a legitimate concern, is past. The chances of a retrial are almost nonexistent. In reviewing a conviction, an appellate court cannot look outside the trial record. Fitzgerald says he and his fellow prosecutors are going back to their day jobs.

And there is an enormous public-policy factor here -- something more important than the vague, theoretical possibility of influencing a fair trial. Just for example, no executive of any company would be allowed by his shareholders to remain mum on a top aide's indictment -- not to mention conviction. He'd be fired.

Why are Bush and his aides hiding behind such hollow excuses? Probably because they know that if they did talk, it might just make things worse. Arguably, they still don't think Libby did anything wrong, putting them in the awkward position of disagreeing with a federal jury's verdict. And in explaining what they say really happened, they might risk either exposing more unseemly facts or being caught in a lie.

But the main reason they are hiding behind these excuses is that they can. There's been no public cost to them from not talking.

Libby: Guilty On 4 of 5 Counts in CIA Leak/PlameGate Case

Yesterday, as I sat pondering how long the jurors in the CIA Leak/Valerie Plame case against Vice President Dick Cheney's former top assistant, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, I very nearly posted here saying I was concerned that, if the jury did not deadlock, it was likely they would find him Not Guilty on most if not all charges.

So color me somewhat pleasantly surprised when the jury returned with a guilty verdict on four of the five charges from against Scooter by federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. I was neither surprised NOR pleased to hear the cable news networks reporting the verdict as if they felt sorry for the man who - not alone - endangered the life of a covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame as political payback for her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, going public with how the Bush Administration "cooked" a story of aluminum tubes and yellow cake in Niger as part of the case to go to war in Iraq. More than Plame was endangered; she was part of a large team working on WMDs that were endangered.

Libby deserves no sympathy. He simply doesn't. The far rightwing, in fact, have given him so much money for "defense" that he has not had to spend a cent of his personal fortune (and all the Bushies appear very wealthy).

But the one member of the jury who spoke out also seemed to hint at "poor Scooter", saying the jury felt like he was the fall guy for a whole network of wrongdoers. I, too, believe this. But it in no way lessons Libby's culpability.

Now, while he could face years in prison because of these convictions, I doubt the White House will waste any time whatsoever in pardoning Libby. It would be wrong for them to do so, but since when do the Bushies care about justice? And besides, they want to give Libby a reason to "shut up" because, now convicted, he might be more spilling to tell on Cheney and Rove and company for their role in a crime for which only Libby was charged.

You may want to check out the Citizens for Ethics & Responsibility in Washington's (CREW) blog statement on the Libby guilty verdict today ("No man is above the law") while Rolling Stone magazine's National daily blog refers to Libby as "the fall guy" and breaks down the verdicts:

Obstruction of justice: Guilty

False statements to FBI (about conversation with Tim Russert): Guilty

False statements (conversation with Matt Cooper): Not Guilty

Perjury before grand jury (about Russert conversation): Guilty

Purjury before grand jury (about Cooper conversation): Guilty

Libby has been found decisively guilty of a coverup — although he was found not guilty of one count of lying to the FBI, he was found guilty of perjuring himself about that same conversation before the grand jury.

What happens to Scooter, is of course, less interesting. The storm “cloud” over the Vice President, to quote prosecutor, is now darkening. The vital thing going forward is whether the prospect of a few years in club fed is enough to make a loyal footsoldier like Libby rat out his old boss.

Naturally, since the Bushies' abhor justice, Libby is already demanding a new trial.

Iraq's Insurgents Get Their Weapons Not Just From America, But Largely From the Department of Defense

Read it and weep from Rosa Brooks (scroll down but I think the intro is well worth your time, too):

ACCORDING TO the defense lawyers at his trial, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby didn't lie to investigators about his role in outing covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. He was just so darn busy with pressing national security matters that he kept forgetting the chummy chats about Plame he'd had with NBC's Tim Russert and Time magazine's Matt Cooper — not to mention his two-hour lunch on the same subject with Judith Miller (late of the New York Times).

The ladies and gentlemen of the press appear skeptical about Libby's "bad memory" defense. But, personally, I find his claim entirely credible.

After all, in the run-up to the Iraq war, President Bush was so busy with pressing national security matters that he completely forgot to ask any questions about the gaping holes in the intelligence presented to him. Condoleezza Rice was so busy with pressing national security matters that she forgot to take false information about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction out of Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, even though the CIA told her that it was false. Dick Cheney was so busy with pressing national security matters (water-boarding prisoners; shooting small animals) that he totally forgot you're not supposed to pressure people to come up with bogus intelligence in the first place.

And the easily forgettable journalists mentioned above were so busy enjoying their access to administration national security officials that they forgot that journalists are supposed to actually investigate stuff, instead of just breathlessly repeating what an "anonymous source" told them over lunch.

Given all the forgetting that was going on back in 2003, why shouldn't we believe that Scooter had a faulty memory too?

Astute observers will have noticed that there's still an awful lot of national security-related forgetting going on today. The Bush administration, for instance, has already forgotten that relying on questionable intelligence can lead to disaster and has taken to announcing direct Iranian involvement in attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq as if it were incontrovertible fact.

According to some anonymous U.S. officials at a very secret, no-recording-or-photography-allowed session in Baghdad on Sunday, U.S. forces have discovered Iranian-made components in some of the bombs used by Iraqi insurgents. Naturally (having forgotten that there might be no war in Iraq at all if it hadn't been for excessive media respect for anonymous sources), every U.S. media outlet dutifully played along and reported the claims. Of course, those claims are hard to verify because both the evidence and the identity of the officials are secret.

Meanwhile, Bush, who keeps forgetting that our intelligence has at times been dangerously wrong, insists that he "can say with certainty that the Quds force, a part of the Iranian government, has provided these sophisticated IEDs that have harmed our troops…. When we find the networks that are enabling these weapons to end up in Iraq, we will deal with them."

Reinforce your bomb shelter, President Ahmadinejad.

Oh, wait; I forgot something too! (Just so you know, I'm also really busy thinking about pressing national security matters.) My fellow Americans, it is my duty to reveal to you that Iran is not the only powerful state that's arming the Iraqi insurgents. On the contrary. There's equally solid evidence that another major world power has been providing the Iraqi insurgents with thousands of new RPGs, machine guns, sniper rifles and other weapons.

Just who is behind this act of hostility? The United States — or anyway, the U.S. Department of Defense.

You heard me. According to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, about 14,000 of the weapons bought (with your tax dollars!) for distribution to Iraqi security forces got, um, misplaced somewhere between getting to Iraq and being transferred to the Iraqi army and police. Instead, analysts say, many of those weapons ended up in the hands of You Know Who.