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W: soft on crime, WMDs
Jul. 3rd, 2007 12:52 pmIs anybody surprised that Scooter's prison sentence was commuted? (Other than those who were expecting a full pardon, that is?)
Let's go over what Libby did. Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent working in WMD investigation - the sort of thing you might think the current administration would want to support.
Unfortunately for her, Plame's husband Joseph Wilson wrote a NY Times op-ed challenging the Bush administration's claims about Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium from Niger, and in retaliation somebody outed her as a CIA operative. Besides the obvious effects on Plame's own career and effectiveness as an agent, this also exposed the CIA front 'Brewster Jennings and Associates', a firm that had been used as part of the cover of several other CIA agents, and may well have cast suspicion on people contacted or recruited by Plame. For obvious reasons the specifics of the damage done by Plame's outing probably won't become public knowledge for decades, if at all, but it's pretty obvious that outing a covert agent whose job was to investigate WMD proliferation is not helpful to any attempts to protect the USA from such weapons.
Libby was convicted, essentially, of obstructing and lying to the investigation into Plame's outing - that is, shielding the culprit. I'm not quite sure what the word for that is; it's not quite 'accessory to treason', but it's not so very far off, and it seems to me that two and a half years* was a pretty lenient sentence. Commuting the sentence entirely, before the appeal process was even completed, makes a joke of the Bush administration's stance on national security and WMDs.
*Plus a fine, which has not been commuted, but let's not delude ourselves that Libby is going to come out of this a poor man.
Let's go over what Libby did. Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent working in WMD investigation - the sort of thing you might think the current administration would want to support.
Unfortunately for her, Plame's husband Joseph Wilson wrote a NY Times op-ed challenging the Bush administration's claims about Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium from Niger, and in retaliation somebody outed her as a CIA operative. Besides the obvious effects on Plame's own career and effectiveness as an agent, this also exposed the CIA front 'Brewster Jennings and Associates', a firm that had been used as part of the cover of several other CIA agents, and may well have cast suspicion on people contacted or recruited by Plame. For obvious reasons the specifics of the damage done by Plame's outing probably won't become public knowledge for decades, if at all, but it's pretty obvious that outing a covert agent whose job was to investigate WMD proliferation is not helpful to any attempts to protect the USA from such weapons.
Libby was convicted, essentially, of obstructing and lying to the investigation into Plame's outing - that is, shielding the culprit. I'm not quite sure what the word for that is; it's not quite 'accessory to treason', but it's not so very far off, and it seems to me that two and a half years* was a pretty lenient sentence. Commuting the sentence entirely, before the appeal process was even completed, makes a joke of the Bush administration's stance on national security and WMDs.
*Plus a fine, which has not been commuted, but let's not delude ourselves that Libby is going to come out of this a poor man.
