The Mack Attack

Thought-provoking clap-trap for the skeptic-minded

Thursday, March 08, 2007

GET THE BALL ROLLING!

The conviction of I. Lewis Libby on charges of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice was grounded in strong evidence and what appeared to be careful deliberation by a jury.

The former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney told the FBI and a grand jury that he had not leaked the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame to journalists but rather had learned it from them. But abundant testimony at his trial showed that he had found out about Ms. Plame from official sources and was dedicated to discrediting her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Particularly for a senior government official, lying under oath is a serious offense. Mr. Libby's conviction should send a message to this and future administrations about the dangers of attempting to block official investigations.

The fall of this skilled and long-respected public servant is particularly sobering because it arose from a Washington scandal remarkable for its lack of substance. It was propelled not by actual wrongdoing but by inflated and frequently false claims, and by the aggressive and occasionally reckless response of senior Bush administration officials -- culminating in Mr. Libby's perjury.

Mr. Wilson was embraced by many because he was early in publicly charging that the Bush administration had "twisted," if not invented, facts in making the case for war against Iraq. In conversations with journalists or in a July 6, 2003, op-ed, he claimed to have debunked evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger; suggested that he had been dispatched by Mr. Cheney to look into the matter; and alleged that his report had circulated at the highest levels of the administration.

A bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee subsequently established that all of these claims were false -- and that Mr. Wilson was recommended for the Niger trip by Ms. Plame, his wife. When this fact, along with Ms. Plame's name, was disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak, Mr. Wilson advanced yet another sensational charge: that his wife was a covert CIA operative and that senior White House officials had orchestrated the leak of her name to destroy her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson.

The partisan furor over this allegation led to the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Yet after two years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald charged no one with a crime for leaking Ms. Plame's name. In fact, he learned early on that Mr. Novak's primary source was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage, an unlikely tool of the White House. The trial has provided convincing evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson by leaking Ms. Plame's identity -- and no evidence that she was, in fact, covert.
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. In so doing he unnecessarily subjected numerous journalists to the ordeal of having to disclose confidential sources or face imprisonment. One, Judith Miller of the New York Times, lost several court appeals and spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify. The damage done to journalists' ability to obtain information from confidential government sources has yet to be measured.

Mr. Wilson's case has besmirched nearly everyone it touched. The former ambassador will be remembered as a blowhard. Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were overbearing in their zeal to rebut Mr. Wilson and careless in their handling of classified information. Mr. Libby's subsequent false statements were reprehensible. And Mr. Fitzgerald has shown again why handing a Washington political case to a federal special prosecutor is a prescription for excess.

Mr. Fitzgerald was, at least, right about one thing: The Wilson-Plame case, and Mr. Libby's conviction, tell us nothing about the war in Iraq.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Blogger pushes envelope

He is being cast by some journalists as a young champion of the First Amendment, jailed for taking a lonely stand against heavy-handed federal prosecutors.
Josh Wolf, a 24-year-old blogger, has spent more than six months behind bars in California -- the longest contempt-of-court term ever served by someone in the media -- for refusing to turn over a videotape he shot of a violent San Francisco demonstration against a Group of Eight summit meeting. Unless a mediation session today can break the impasse, he will likely remain imprisoned at least until the current grand jury's term expires in July.
"Even in high school, he was standing up for things that weren't considered popular," says his mother, Liz Wolf-Spada.
But Wolf's rationale for withholding the video, and refusing to testify, is less than crystal clear. There are no confidential sources involved in the case. He sold part of the tape to local television stations and posted another portion on his blog. Why, then, is he willing to give up his freedom over the remaining footage?
"It's one thing to say journalists must respect promises of confidentiality they made to their sources," says Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. "It would be quite another to say journalists have a right to refuse to testify even about non-confidential sources. When something is videotaped in a public place, it's hard to see even an implied agreement of confidentiality."
In an interview with PBS's "Frontline," Wolf says: "There was a trust established between people involved in the organization that I was covering and myself . . . that what I chose to release was what I chose to release, and that I wasn't an investigator for the state."
Wolf taped the anarchists' San Francisco protest, against a G-8 summit meeting in Scotland, in July 2005. One police officer, Peter Shields, had his skull fractured by a hooded assailant with a pipe or baseball bat. Three people were charged in the attack. Police say protesters also put a mattress under Shields's police car and tried to set it on fire.
But in an unusual move, federal prosecutors took over the arson case from state authorities on grounds that San Francisco's police department receives funding from Washington. While there are no outward signs of an active probe, Luke Macaulay, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, says that "the incident is under investigation so that the grand jury can determine what, if any, crimes were committed." He would not elaborate.
Martin Garbus, Wolf's attorney, says the police car received limited damage. He says Wolf "is staying in jail for close to 200 days so they can investigate who broke the taillight on a cop car." Garbus also questions why federal prosecutors are involved, adding Wolf might be protected under California's shield law for journalists if state authorities were handling the case. There is no federal shield law.
Garbus has offered to allow U.S. District Judge William Alsup to review the tape privately to buttress his client's contention that it contains only interviews with protesters who removed their masks, not evidence of a crime. Alsup, who has described Wolf as an "alleged journalist," declined.
Wolf was a student at San Francisco State who worked part time as an outreach staffer at a community college television station. He started a blog and occasionally sold videotape to news organizations.
"I would define a journalist as someone who brings news to the public," says Garbus, a noted First Amendment lawyer handling the case on a pro bono basis. "It's a definition that might cause journalists some discomfort because it opens up the gates."
But U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan says in a court filing that Wolf's resistance "is apparently fueled by his anointment as a journalistic martyr" and that he needs "to come to grips with the fact that he was simply a person with a video camera who happened to record some public events."
The day after the protest, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, Wolf referred to himself on his Web site as an "artist, an activist, an anarchist and an archivist."
Wolf has repeatedly lost in the courts, with the U.S. Court of Appeals of the 9th Circuit upholding the grand jury subpoena for his testimony. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is among the groups that filed briefs on his behalf.
Wolf's case is the latest in a spate of prosecutions in which journalists have been threatened with imprisonment. Judith Miller, the former New York Times reporter who spent 85 days in jail for her initial refusal to testify in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, has embraced Wolf's cause. "Mr. Wolf is the latest addition to a club whose growing membership should trouble us all," Miller wrote in the New York Sun last year.
Two San Francisco Chronicle reporters, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, avoided jail last month for refusing to testify about how they got grand jury testimony involving allegations of steroid use by baseball stars. Their source, Troy Ellerman, a lawyer for an executive with the laboratory under investigation, was revealed when he pleaded guilty to contempt of court and obstruction of justice. The Chronicle has drawn some criticism for protecting Ellerman because he charged that prosecutors had leaked the testimony and said the publicity would deprive his client of a fair trial.
Wolf's case has attracted far less attention because he is not affiliated with any news outlet. Wolf-Spada, who says her son grew up with her in "a liberal Democratic household" after her divorce, urged members of Congress during a Washington visit to press the Justice Department to withdraw the subpoena.
"Truthfully, I don't think it's even about the tape or the police car," she says. "They want him to testify so they can develop a list of who protests in San Francisco."

For an Opaque White House, A Reflection of New Scrutiny

By Peter Baker of the Washington Post

Shortly before he was inaugurated for his second term, President Bush was asked why no one was held responsible for the mistakes of the first. "We had an accountability moment," he replied, "and that's called the 2004 elections."
Two years and a stinging midterm election later, Bush is having another accountability moment, but this one isn't working out as well. The conviction of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has coincided with a string of investigations into the mistreatment of injured soldiers and the purge of federal prosecutors, putting the operations of his administration into harsh relief.
The timing may be coincidental, but the confluence of events has revived a pattern largely missing through the six years of Bush's presidency, in which high-level officials accused of wrongdoing are grilled, fired and sometimes even jailed. For an administration that has been unusually opaque and mostly insulated from aggressive congressional oversight and prosecutorial investigation, it may seem like a gut-churning harbinger.
While the president's aides watch uncomfortably as one hearing after another plays out on Capitol Hill, the Libby conviction hit a nerve inside the White House. The onetime chief of staff to Vice President Cheney was well liked in the West Wing, and the notion of him going to prison dispirited the colleagues glued to televisions as the verdict was announced. Bush watched in the Oval Office with aides Joshua B. Bolten and Dan Bartlett, then instructed Bartlett to put out a statement expressing sadness for Libby.
"This has been a huge cloud over the White House," said Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist close to the Bush team. "It caused a lot of intellectual, emotional and political energy to be expended when it should have been expended on the agenda. They're never going to fully recover from this. If you're looking at legacy, this episode gets prominently mentioned in every recap of the Bush administration, much like Iran-contra and Monica Lewinsky."
The Libby case never reached the level of those scandals, of course, but it became a proxy for many in Washington eager to re-litigate the origins of the Iraq war. If Libby lied about his role in the CIA leak case, critics eagerly used that to reinforce their argument that Bush led the nation to war on false pretenses, in effect attacking the centerpiece of his presidency.
"This verdict brings accountability at last for official deception and the politics of smear and fear," said
Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), Bush's Democratic challenger in 2004.
While the White House publicly withheld comment, some Bush advisers expressed outrage, seeing a double standard and citing the documents-smuggling case of former Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. Berger. "Scooter didn't do anything," said former Cheney counselor Mary Matalin. "And his personal record and service are impeccable. How do you make sense of a system where a security principal admits to stuffing classified docs in his pants and says, 'I'm sorry,' and a guy who is rebutting a demonstrable partisan liar is going through this madness?"
A senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the president ordered aides not to comment publicly, disputed the idea that Bush has escaped scrutiny in the past. "I don't buy the conventional wisdom that we haven't had accountability in the past," he said. "Is it different because Democrats are in charge? Of course. . . . But that's fine, that's a reality that we're prepared to deal with."
No one has been quicker to declare the return of accountability than Democrats, who are using their newfound subpoena power to sharp effect in hauling up Pentagon officials to answer for poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and in giving fired U.S. attorneys a venue to blame their dismissals on administration politics. In two months, Democrats have held 81 hearings on Iraq. "This is just the beginning," said
Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. "What a difference a year makes."
But accountability politics can also be dangerous to the touch. Washington became consumed during the presidency of Emanuel's onetime boss, Bill Clinton, whose administration came under scrutiny of at least seven independent counsels and even more Republican congressional committees. The atmosphere was so toxic that Clinton adviser Paul Begala put an attorney on retainer before even joining the White House staff.
The Republican-led impeachment of Clinton for lying under oath about his affair with Lewinsky backfired politically, and Washington grew so leery that it let the independent-counsel law lapse. When Bush was elected along with a Congress controlled by the same party, a new era was ushered in. With occasional exceptions, such as the commission that looked into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush largely escaped the klieg-light atmosphere. No senior officials were fired for the missing weapons in Iraq or the Abu Ghraib abuse. Three officials blamed by some for mishandling Iraq were given Medals of Freedom.
That began changing after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005 and congressional Republicans investigated the administration's slow response. The change accelerated with the Democratic victory in the November elections. The next day, Bush fired Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld after months of deteriorating conditions in Iraq. Rumsfeld's successor, Robert M. Gates, has proved willing to fire others for mismanaging Walter Reed.
The risk for Democrats would be overplaying the accountability hand. Their attempts to impose limits on Bush's ability to fight the war have collapsed repeatedly and left them unable to fashion a coherent approach to the most serious issue in the country. Some Republicans suggested that the public could tire of repeated hearings such as those held this week and write them off to partisanship.
"They bring up sort of old Washington," said former Bush aide Nicolle Wallace. "The Democrats have to walk a fine line and be careful. People don't want to turn on the TV and see every story being about the obstruction of people trying to do things. . . . The people who will stand out in Washington are the ones who will look forward."
Two people looking forward with choices to make are Bush and Libby. The president came under instant pressure from conservatives to pardon his former aide. "Justice demands that Bush issue a pardon and lower the curtain on an embarrassing drama that shouldn't have lasted beyond its opening act," National Review said within hours of the verdict.
And Libby may have to decide if he has anything else to tell authorities. John Q. Barrett, an Iran-contra prosecutor who teaches at St. John's University, recalled James W. McCord Jr. in Watergate and Alan Fiers in Iran-contra, who under threat of prison recanted past versions of events. If the jury was right that Libby lied, Barrett said, "he's now sitting wherever he is with cold sweat and troubled stomach and truth that he hasn't told. . . . Whatever the chips, if he held them and didn't lay them down, this may be the moment to decide."

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