Sustainability Yeyuh, That’s How We Roll!
by Ward Harkavy
As far as Bush‘s bitches are concerned, Scooter Libby‘s release from the threat of prison is da shizzit. I mean, now presidential dawg Miss Beazley can resume playing with her Scooter.
But keep in mind that Libby’s trial revealed just how certain it is that Libby was simply Dick Cheney‘s bitch in the Plamegate scandal and that Cheney ran roughshod over everyone — Bush included — in his quest to get even with CIA agent Valerie Plame‘s husband, Joe Wilson, for blowing the whistle on the regime’s lies about Iraq before the unjustified invasion. Yeah, and just as Miss Beazley is Bush’s bitch, Bush is Cheney’s.
Don’t revisit the whole damned mess. Just take a look at “Trial reveals White House secrets,” a concise wrapup of the Libby trial from last March by the BBC’s Richard Allen Greene:
The courthouse drama revealed the inner workings of a White House under siege over one of the reasons given for going to war in Iraq.
The situation quickly spun further and further out of control for the White House, pitting the vice-president and his aide against other Bush officials in the scramble to deny responsibility for leaks and attacks on critics.
Greene neatly and quickly laid out the story and pointed out, in case you’ve forgotten amid the flurry of stories focusing on Libby’s freedom, that
Libby himself testified that Cheney had been “upset” and “disturbed,” Greene noted. Just think how much more Libby knows and much more willing he would have been willing to talk if he’d actually been thrown into prison for a while.
As it was, Libby revealed quite a lot during the trial — including something that many of us already knew: that Cheney, not Bush, is the most powerful person in the Bush regime. Greene noted:
Mr Cheney and Libby sought more information about Mr Wilson, insiders testified.
And Libby told a number of people about the link between Mr Wilson, his wife Ms Plame, and the CIA, recipients of the information said.
Ms Plame’s identity was not the only leak coming out of the vice-president’s office, Mr Libby testified to the grand jury investigating the Plame disclosure.
In order to defend himself against Mr Wilson’s accusations, Mr Cheney persuaded the president to authorise the declassification of part of one of the government’s most secret intelligence briefings, the National Intelligence Estimate.
But only Mr Cheney and Libby knew the president had done that, leaving other key aides shocked to hear the vice-presidential aide leaking it to reporters by phone.
And because so few people knew about the declassification, some administration officials were left arguing in meetings that it should be made public when other colleagues present at the meetings had already started revealing sections of it.
And this administration and its GOP flunkies in Congress are so upset about leaks? Please.
Now some of you will point out that it wasn’t Libby but rather Richard Armitage who outed Plame as a CIA agent.
That makes the Libby case even more intriguing: If he didn’t obstruct justice and lie to cover up the leaking of Plame’s name, then what was he covering up?
The details of Cheney’s pre-war machinations will eventually come out. Too bad Libby didn’t get a chance to sit in a jail cell and start thinking about rolling over — not with Miss Beazley but on top of his boss Cheney.