Libby, the fall guy
Dasu Krishnamoorty
A man was convicted on Tuesday for perjury, releasing a mosaic of editorial responses in the American media. That is because the convict happens to be I. Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. The liberal media celebrated the embarrassment to the Bush administration while GOP media fumed and fretted. The conviction follows an investigation into the leak of the identity of a CIA operative Valerie Plame. The leak is believed to be linked to her husband Joseph Wilson debunking the very theory President Bush had relied on to go to war with Iraq, a story with which The Hoot readers (Valerie) are familiar. What is the subject-matter of his lie? Libby told the jury different things at different stages of the trial about who revealed the identity of the CIA operative to him. He was not the lone victim of tricks memory played. Judith Miller too admitted she had weak memory.
?It (the verdict) did not tell us whether someone deliberately blew Valeri Plame Wilson¿s cover or erase serious concerns about the prosecutor¿s abuse of the First Amendment,? the New York Times wrote in frustration. Rupert Murdoch¿s New York Post asserted that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald added nothing to what was well known about the question that ostensibly prompted this probe in the first place.? The prosecutor forgot about the leak issue and spent all his time in proving that Libby had lied. Libby¿s White House connection seems to have triggered the farce that the American public and media witnessed in the last two years.
?The conviction is certainly a travesty of justice,? said the Wall Street Journal in an angry editorial. What is still a mystery is why the prosecutor persisted in the trial when he knew that Richard Armitage, a Bush critic and a former Deputy Secretary of State, had told FBI that he was the primary source who revealed Ms. Plame¿s identity? A WSJ columnist claimed that the prosecutor had asked Armitage and Robert Novak (who first wrote in the New York Times about Ms. Plame being the wife of Joseph Wilson) to keep that information to themselves. The Los Angeles Times too was intrigued. It said, ?After I. Lewis ?Scooter? Libby was indicted but long before his trial began, it was clear that he was not, in fact, the person who first leaked the secret identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to reporters. He did not violate the law barring disclosure of agents.?
Novak had said that two administration officials had passed to him the identity of the CIA operative. These two are believed to be Karl Rove, chief aide to President Bush, and Libby. Yet the only person to suffer is Libby, strangely not for leaking the identity but for perjury. The Washington Post thought, ?It would have been sensible for Mr. Fitzgerald to end his investigation after learning about Mr. Armitage. Instead, like many Washington special prosecutors before him, he pressed on, pursuing every tangent in the case.?
This trial was significant for media in many ways. The prosecutor summoned several journalists to depose in the case. Most of them, including Matt Cooper of the Time magazine, responded. But Judith Miller of the Times refused and went to jail, though she made an appearance sometime after her release. Whatever the inadequacies of the verdict, the Times editorial complained that it had failed to erase serious concerns about the prosecutor¿s abuse of the First Amendment. ?We also do not understand why the federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, chose to wage war with the news media in assembling his case, going so far as to jail a Times reporter, Judith Miller, for refusing to reveal the name of a confidential source.? The Washington Post thought that the prosecutor had unnecessarily subjected numerous journalists to the ordeal of having to disclose confidential sources or face imprisonment. ?The damage done to journalists` ability to obtain information from confidential government sources has yet to be measured,? it said.
WSJ raised the more important point about how the case had damaged the sensitive source-reporter relations. It said, ?As for the media, most of our brethren were celebrating the conviction yesterday because it damaged the Bush Administration they loathe. But they too will pay a price for holding Mr. Fitzgerald`s coat. The Bush Administration will soon be history, but the damage Mr. Fitzgerald has done to the ability to protect media sources and to the willingness of government officials to speak openly to reporters will last far longer.?
A professor at George Madison School of Law Donald D. Rotunda wrote in the Wall street Journal, ?Experts fear that the prosecutor had sent wrong messages to future witnesses who would tell the prosecutor nothing, invoking the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Among the unhappy precedents of the Libby verdict stands: Executive branch officials will hide from the press, which is unfortunate because ?leaks? can be an important check on all three branches of government.?
Boston Globe saw a cloud over Cheney after this verdict. It said, ?Cheney tried to discredit Wilson. But the smear boomeranged. The jurors -- and the public -- know that the case is about an attempt by the vice president to discredit a former government official who had the audacity to challenge false statements about the war. Fitzgerald too said the American people would know more about the ?cloud over the vice president? and ?the cloud over the White House? if Libby had provided straight answers. Now Cheney can lift that cloud by giving the public some straight answers of his own.?
The trial is a farce because everyone connected with the leak barring Libby has escaped the prosecutor¿s eye. The man who could not remember who told him what and when paid the price. Rotunda said that the trial featured a parade of different memories. In the end, Libby became the fall guy for others in the White House.
There are now calls for presidential pardon from the conservative press. Free Scooter Libby, cried the New York Post in its editorial, demanding that ?President Bush should make things right - by pardoning Libby.? The Journal said, ?Maybe now Mr. Bush will realize that this case was always a political fight over Iraq and do the right thing by pardoning Mr. Libby.? The National Review maintained that the verdict had conclusively proved one thing: A White House aide became the target of a politicized prosecution set in motion by bureaucratic in-fighting and political cowardice.? Pardon advocates argue that Libby alone cannot be punished when there were so many other self-proclaimed leakers.