I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby
By Steven Jonas
Introduction: This is the first in an occasional series
that I will be running of columns that I published both on OpEdNews and other
sites, that bear relevance to current events. There will be very slight, if any, editing,
and contemporaneous notes in [ ]. I
wrote this one, in 2007, on the commutation by Pres. George W. Bush of the sentence
that Scooter Libby received for lying and obstruction of Justice in the Valerie
Plame case. The whole episode is, of
course, now receiving wide publicity because President
Trump has chosen to issue a full pardon to Libby. One still wonders if Libby was taking the
fall for a higher-up (guess who?) just as any of the Trump lower-downs might,
or might not, take the fall for him. This
column was originally published on the old BuzzFlash, on July 10, 2007
In
the famous Humphrey Bogart/Ingrid Bergman movie Casablanca, the character Captain Renault of
the French police is famously played by Claude Rains. Upon walking into Rick's
(the Humphrey Bogart character) bar near the beginning of the movie, he
famously says: "I'm shocked, shocked
to find that gambling is going on here!" And so, the reaction among many
on all sides of the political spectrum to the Libby commutation has been:
"shocked, shocked" to find
that it has happened.
How could Bush do this? After all, he has always been so strict on the question
of commutations, and pardons too. It is so obviously political, or a payback,
or a payoff, or a cover-up, or a bone for his "conservative" base, or
he is reaching out at least halfway to Sean Hannity (who is saying that well,
it's OK, but now Bush should really go and do the right [in both senses, I
guess] thing and pardon the guy." [Oh my!
Hannity was involved in that one, too!]) Yes, it is obviously most of
those things and probably all of them.
For
example, on July 3, the well-known journalist and author Robert Parry said: "President
Bush's decision to spare Scooter Libby from jail time represents the final step
in a cover-up that began four years ago when Bush, Vice President Cheney and
other top officials launched a campaign to discredit an American citizen for
daring to question Bush's case for war in Iraq. . . . That criminal act was
followed by lies to the public and an organized cover-up. By commuting Libby's sentence,
Bush now has made sure that Libby will keep his mouth shut and that the full
story will never be told."
Former
Congresswoman and key Watergate impeachment protagonist Elizabeth Holtzman said: "The
commutation undoes the simple application of justice. It's just one more
example of how this administration believes that the president and his team can
violate the law with impunity."
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