IF THE SHRUB PARDONS LIBBY . . .

You guys do speak the truth. Has he ever shown any sense of loyalty or honor above himself?

a pardon for Libby is the right thing to do. After all he didn't realy do anything wrong. If he had, there would be someone going to jail for releasing the info on Plame. No one is in jail. All they got Libby on was "lieing". Nothing else has come of the case and no one esle has been mentioned as the "leak".

As MM said it would be no different then what Clinton did at the end of his last term. No one seemed to mind then.

Bush has always acted without regard to any "laws" domestic or international. That he's been able to skirt around all the laws in existence today just shows how crass he can be, and continue to ignore the American public and congress. After all the serious actions by Bush during the past six years, a pardon for Libby will look small in comparison. Depending on when Libby begins to serve his sentence, Bush can't afford to wait for the pardon. Anyways, Bush has said he's waiting for all the appeals and such to work before he steps in.

I'm with the crowd that says the "base" will expect a pardon, the rest already hate him and their opinion is fixed, so he might as well play to the base. That said, President Bush does seem to have a moral compass that while not pointing north, might not allow him to pardon someone convicted of a crime by a standing court.

I think using the word "moral compass" in relation to Bush is an oxymoron. Torture, lying, and illegal wiretaps are only some of them.

It just doesn't point in the direction most of us consider "moral"

Not true. Some of us did mind the pardons Clinton granted at the end of his term. It's fairly common for Presidents to pardon a bunch of their cronies on their way out of office, and if GWB pardon's Libby in January '09 after Libby has served 18 months of his sentence then I'd be ok with that.

If a man was convicted for lying about a burglary, while no burglary had ever been found to have happened, then the man should be pardoned. Especially if shown that the prosecutor ignored the man that committed the burglary, that is if one actually did happen, but later was found to have not burglarized anything. No crime happened. How can you lie about something that did not exist? If the perpetrator of the supposed crime is deemed innocent, then why pursue someone that supposedly made a false statement about the crime? This issue is nothing more than a travesty of justice, by an over zealous prosecutor that was looking for a tree but got lost in the forest. End of story.

Re: IF THE SHRUB PARDONS LIBBY . . .


I believe there is nothing to stop him from doing this if he wishes. Certainly the action would be more underastandable than (say) Clinton's pardons at the end of his administration. Moreover the motives for it would be better and more understandable.

The Libby trial and conviction was a travisty of justice. The supposed "crime" of outing a minor functionary of the CIA who was in a desk job in headquarters and who was already obviously misusing her position for partisan purposes never merited the actions that followed. This was a case of partisan political battles fought in the context of a supposed criminal conspiracy. Libby is the victim.

In the debate the other day, Hillary stated very clearly that she consulted all the experts and all the latest greatest information and intel on Saddam Hussein, just before she voted for the authorization to go to war. She made no claim that Bush twisted her arm or doctored the information. All of that has been spin, pure and simple. This is a decision she has never said was a mistake based on the information she had at the time. This is very important. If anyone was privy to all of the information and issues leading into what happened before the war and since, Hillary was. As much as I dislike Hillary as a candidate, I find her answers in the debate revealing and contradictory to the entire Democratic Party spin machine.

In the debate, the excuse she used for her vote was she thought Bush would allow the inspectors to play around with their inspections longer. This is obviously a lame excuse with nothing much to it. I remember clearly that the authorization was sought as an obvious last step before taking Hussein out, and everyone knew it, or should have known it, especially Congress. We virtually telegraphed the day we would enter Iraq to the entire world, as we ramped up to the day. That was why the vote was taken.

One more huge discrepancy and hugely revealing, she plainly said we are safer now than we were in 2001, which is in direct contradiction of the spin of her own party for the last few years. Obviously, these statements have not been widely reported, but she said them nonetheless.

So the Bogus War claim is spin, plain and simple, and even Hillary dispatched that notion if you listened to the debate.

No matter what any Democrat or Republican can say, it's a bogus war, a crime.

You seem to be blissfully unaware of what the entire Libby affair was about. Valerie Plame's husband was saying that the intelligence was false, that the yellow cake story was a canard, and that the administration knew it at the time. It is rather silly to claim that Clinton, or anyone outside the inner circles of this administration was "privy to all the information." It is precisely because people of good character challenged such a claim is false that we have this topic in the first place. Unless, of course, you intend to indulge in character assassination against Mr. Wilson. We are used to that sort of thing from conservatives.

Setanta, Wilson's intelligence work, and we use the term loosely when we say it was, but his work told us nothing we did not already know. That is the whole point. People like Novak were trying to figure out how Wilson did what he did and said what he did, because it made no sense in context with previous intelligence. The link with his wife working in the CIA helped explain the political undercurrents within the agency, and he thought the public deserved to know it. Democrats love to look at some leakers as whistle blowers. In this case, Novak was a whistle blower, but he got the information from the CIA, Armitage, Whos Who, and finally the administration. He had the information without Libby. But he never figured it was a leak anyway, because the agency itself never warned Novak of the covert status, but instead confirmed her identity.

But bottom line, Novak provided useful information, and the reason it was available was because the CIA was inept in lots of ways. First, Wilson should never have been involved, and secondly they did not protect their own agents properly.

But if the leak was a crime, then the man that originally revealed it has never been charged with the crime, Richard Armitage.

The yellow cake story was a crucial part of the administration's allegations about Iraqi womd programs, and for the claim that UN inspectors were being lied to. Wilson was called in for his expertise in West African affairs and those of Nigeria in particular. His contribution was to discredit the yellow cake story, which is not what the administration wanted to hear. So they went after him, but attempted what passes for subtlety in the Cheney monarchy--they attacked his wife instead of him.

Your claim that Clinton, or anyone else in the Congress for that matter, was privy to all of the information is unfounded.

And Wilson had no experience with intelligence, none, zero. He provided nothing useful. And nothing he found was from intelligence work. It was totally political. If that was the best the CIA could do, no wonder they were utter failures.

You didn't need to repeat for me the conservative slander propaganda on this topic, i've heard it before.

Both sides have repeated the same arguments over and over. The side I argue here is still the most logical. We can agree to disagree, but to label the war as based on a lie is over the top and you guys know it. Hillary admitted as much in the debate, not in those words, but by key points that she made. She has never disavowed her vote for the war, and she also said we are safer now than in 2001.

Dammit okie, When will you ever get your story straight?
You're so confused, your posts only provides misinformation for people trying to get to the truth.




washingtonpost.com
Side Issue in the Plame Case: Who Sent Her Spouse to Africa?

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 11, 2005; A08



The origin of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's trip to Niger in 2002 to check out intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase uranium has become a contentious side issue to the inquiry by special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is looking into whether a crime was committed with the exposure of Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife, as a covert CIA employee.

After he went public in 2003 about the trip, senior Bush administration officials, trying to discredit Wilson's findings, told reporters that Wilson's wife, who worked at the CIA, was the one who suggested the Niger mission for her husband. Days later, Plame was named as an "agency operative" by syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who has said he did not realize he was, in effect, exposing a covert officer. A Senate committee report would later say evidence indicated Plame suggested Wilson for the trip.

Over the past months, however, the CIA has maintained that Wilson was chosen for the trip by senior officials in the Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division (CPD) -- not by his wife -- largely because he had handled a similar agency inquiry in Niger in 1999. On that trip, Plame, who worked in that division, had suggested him because he was planning to go there, according to Wilson and the Senate committee report.

The 2002 mission grew out of a request by Vice President Cheney on Feb. 12 for more information about a Defense Intelligence Agency report he had received that day, according to a 2004 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. An aide to Cheney would later say he did not realize at the time that this request would generate such a trip.

I know nothing of the kind, and the war was based on a willful, knowing lie.