Soccer Dad

On libby and wilson

Who would've thunk it? The Washington Post and National Review agreeing? But on the subject of the indictment of I. Lewis Libby, former chief of staff to VP Richard Cheney both publications make similar (correct) judgments.
The Washington Post:

That said, the charges Mr. Fitzgerald brought against Mr. Libby are not technicalities. According to the indictment, Mr. Libby lied to both the FBI and a grand jury. No responsible prosecutor would overlook a pattern of deceit like that alleged by Mr. Fitzgerald. The prosecutor was asked to investigate a serious question, and such obstructions are, as he said yesterday, like throwing sand in the umpire's face. In this case, they seem to have contributed to Mr. Fitzgerald's distressing decision to force a number of journalists to testify about conversations with a confidential source.

Please spare us the excuses warmed over from Democratic talking points in the 1990s: the prosecutor is out-of-control, there was no underlying crime, etc., etc. It is the responsibility of anyone, especially a public official, to tell the truth to FBI agents and grand juries. If Libby didn't, he should face the consequences. Fitzgerald's indictment is not a Ronnie Earle-style partisan production, held together with scotch tape and malicious intentions. But this is the prosecutor's day, when he gets to make the argument against his target unrebutted. Libby will get his chance to respond, and it might be that Fitzgerald's case looks weaker soon.

But conservatives would be well-advised not to start slamming Fitzgerald. We don't know all the facts and until we do, his acts are open to dueling interpretations. It seemed unfair for him to talk at his press conference of Libby damaging national security by revealing classified information, when Libby wasn't charged with that. But this was a departure for the otherwise restrained and responsible Fitzgerald. The Bush administration, for its part, has conducted itself with notable forbearance in this case, avoiding the sort of smears that the Clinton administration routinely resorted to whenever a prosecutor proved inconvenient.

If Libby perjured himself he should be punished. It doesn't matter if a crime had been committed regarding Mrs. Wilson or (as apparently happened) not.

However I note with some irony this item, "U.S. Falls in World Press Freedom Ranking":

The United States dropped more than 20 spots, to 44th place, mainly because of the imprisonment of New York Times reporter Judith Miller and judicial action that was "undermining the privacy of journalistic sources," the statement said.

Let's go back to the Washington Post's editorial:

The public record offers no indication that Mr. Libby or any other official deliberately exposed Ms. Plame to punish her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Rather, Mr. Libby and other officials, including Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff, apparently were seeking to combat the sensational allegations of a critic. They may have believed that Ms. Plame's involvement was an important part of their story of why Mr. Wilson was sent to investigate claims that Iraq sought uranium ore from Niger, and why his subsequent -- and mostly erroneous -- allegations that the administration twisted that small part of the case against Saddam Hussein should not be credited.

As soon as Novak wrote his column and Wilson claimed injury, the media brought forth its full sense of outrage, accepting Wilson's charge without skepticism. The charge of revenge, and the frog walk of Karl Rove were assumed to be true and most reporting since then have accepted them as true.

Little attention has been paid as to whether Wilson has any credibility. Nice of the Post to notice that he doesn't. But in its dead tree edition yesterday here are some of the profiles of the players (this does not seem to be in the online edition where the profiles are more complete and seemingly fairer.)

Valerie Plame: An undercover CIA operative who specializes in weapons of mass destruction, her cover was blown by news accounts that she had helped arrange for her husband to go on a fact finding trip trip to Niger for the agency.
Joseph C. Wilson IV - Plame's husband, a former ambassador, has accused the White House of revealing his wife's identity in a smear campaign. He says officials were acting out of revenge because he challenged justifications for the Iraq war.

Well according to Fitzgerald, Plame was not undercover at the time her identity was revealed. Her position was classified, though. But more importantly Wilson's views are provided in the excerpt without any qualification. Yes that's what he alleged, but there seems to be no proof of it. Yet the Post's capsule summary just gives us his views and doesn't even acknowledge that his challenge wasn't found to be credible.

So think about that. A partisan goes abroad and concludes that the President was wrong. He writes a seriously flawed op-ed about it. When his indiscretion leads to his wife's identity being revealed he cries foul. And the media credulously repeats his bogus story and demands justice forcing the government to investigate itself. That would seem to suggest that the press's power in this country is quite strong. If the media were honest with themselves, they'd realize that their credibility should have just taken a big hit. But the Judith Miller imprisonment notwithstanding the media has quite a bit of freedom in this country: to be reckless and unaccountable. In our Bizarro world the mainstream media act like champions, when in fact they're losers.

Instapundit looks at another loser of the Plame scandal, the CIA:

This leaves two possibilities. One is that the mission was intended to result in the New York Times oped all along, meaning that the CIA didn't care much about Plame's status, and was trying to meddle in domestic politics. This reflects very badly on the CIA.

The other possibility is that they're so clueless that they did this without any nefarious plan, because they're so inept, and so prone to cronyism and nepotism, that this is just business as usual.