There's a lot of good material out there on the blogs and in the press about the indictment of Scooter Libby. The Iraq War and the lies used to justify it were at the basis of the crimes in which Libby was involved. And the Iraq War looks to be the defining disaster of the Bush administration.
On the linguistic front, the war could put an end to the use of the word "neoconservative" for years. Probably not. More likely, "tipping point" will become as taboo for the military as "light at the end of the tunnel" became after the Vietnam War.
Although Fitzgerald isn't going after the war frauds themselves, e.g., the forged Nigerien documents, the case is still likely to be a kind of "Pentagon Papers" event for the Iraq War. A lot of information will go on the record on how the phony case for war was ginned up and sold to the public and to an all-too-receptive Congress.
I heard David Brooks on the PBS Newshour today. I apologize once again for having suggested that Brooks might become a substantial commentator one day. He's headed toward Victor Davis Hanson levels of hackery. His line was, oh, shoot, it's just one guy; if there wasn't a conspiracy with everybody sitting around a table saying, hey, Valerie Plame is an undercover CIA agent so let's deliberately break the law and expose her identity publicly, then the whole business was no big deal.
Before you know it, the OxyContin legions will be saying that Scooter was just some eccentric guy that hardly anybody in the government paid any attention to. Kind of like an alcoholic who retires but then hangs around outside his old office building for years, babbling to passers-by. (Yes, I actually know of a case where that happened. Although that guy hung around in the building lobby.)
If some Democrats and war critics are disappointed at only one war perpetrator being indicted on Friday, Joe Wilson is apparently not among them. He gave an interview to the Spanish daily El País, in an article whose title is one of the key quotes, "Procesar a Libby y seguir investigando a Rove es el peor escenario para Bush" 29.10.05.
Actually, it seems to be standard practice for European papers to use abbreviated quotations in headlines. So I'll give the full quote. But I'm going to translate with indirect quotations, because I assume the interview was conducted in English and translated into Spanish. It's effectively impossible to get the exact original quotation when re-translating it into the original.
The whole quotation is:
La decisión del gran jurado de procesar a Lewis Libby y la determinación del fiscal especial Patrick Fitzgerald de continuar la investigación en torno a la actuación de Karl Rove, el principal asesor del presidente, es el peor escenario para Bush.
He says that the decision of the grand jury to proceed against Lewis Libby and the determinatio of the special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to continue the investigation against Karl Rove is the worst scenario for Bush.
He goes on to say that the Wilsons have directed their attorneys to look into opening a civil proceeding against Libby. Which is one of many directions this story will develop. Civil suits by the Wilsons are likely to produce even more information about the administration "lie factory" that manufactured the case for war.
Wilson picked up on Fitzgerald's stress in his news conference Friday on the national security importance of the case. And he says that people (like that pathetic Kay Bailey Hutchison) who try to minimize the seriousness of the charges are just out of it:
El fiscal Fitzgerald lo ha dicho: es un asunto que afecta a la seguridad nacional. Aquellos que intentan devaluar la gravedad de delitos como perjurio, falso testimonio y obstrucción a la justicia están fuera de la realidad.
Wilson doesn't appear to be especially concerned that Libby is not being charged under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, although he doesn't seem to have any more idea than the lay aficionados of the case why he wasn't. (I'm taking it for granted that the notion that Plame wasn't really undercover has been banned to the darker caves of Wingnuttia, but who knows?)
But he expresses great confidence in the prosecutor's ability and intention to get to the bottom of this.
In the interview, Wilson seems to think that Fitzgerald said he intends to use another grand jury if he decides to indict Rove: "El fiscal Fitzgerald ha dicho que la investigación no está terminada y que continuará con otro gran jurado." But I don't know that Fitzgerald has said that publicly. I've seen one alternative possibility suggested that would involve Rove having waived the right to have the case go before a grand jury.
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