Libby Sentence Commuted Omertà: Taking Care Of Business? Or Burning The Bush?

Has George W. Bush just driven another nail in his own coffin and that of the GOP? By commuting Scooter Libby's sentence he makes it obvious that Libby knows too much and has to be be 'taken care of'.

AP via Houston Chronicle, July 2, 2007, 4:47PM
Bush spares Libby from prison

WASHINGTON — President Bush spared former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby from a 2 1/2-year prison term on Monday, issuing an order that commutes his sentence.

This is a breaking news update. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby cannot delay his 2 1/2-year prison term in the CIA leak case, a federal appeals panel unanimously ruled Monday.

The decision is a major setback for Libby, who is running out of legal options and who probably will have to surrender to prison in weeks. The ruling puts pressure on President Bush, who has been sidestepping calls by Libby's allies to pardon the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Libby was convicted in March of lying and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. He is the highest-ranking White House official ordered to prison since the Iran-Contra affair.

Libby believed he had a good chance of overturning the conviction on appeal and asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to put the sentence on hold. In a two-sentence ruling, the court refused.

The following post is bumped from Sunday, March 11, 2007
Omertà: Taking Care Of Business? Or Burning The Bush?

Omertà:

"an extreme form of loyalty and solidarity in the face of authority. One of its absolute tenets is that it is deeply demeaning and shameful to betray even one’s deadliest enemy to the authorities. Observers of the mafia debate whether omertà should best be understood as an expression of social consensus surrounding the mafia or whether it is instead a pragmatic response based primarily on fear. The point is succinctly made in a popular Sicilian proverb Cu e surdu, orbu e taci, campa cent'anni 'mpaci ("He who is deaf, blind and silent will live a hundred years in peace")."

Can George W. Bush preemptively pardon himself by pardoning Libby?

It looks like he'll have to. Scooter Libby is one of those guys the old joke "We have to kill him - he knows too much" was the perfect description of. But Libby is too well known. Taking him out would be too obvious. So he has to be taken care of or his former bosses might have a vacation they'd rather not have.


I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former Chief of Staff to VP Dick Cheney, convicted last week of obstruction of justice, making false statements to the FBI to impede an investigation, and perjuring himself before a federal grand jury is, in the words of Frank Rich, a really special guy, a "Cheney’s Cheney", while one of Deadeye Dick's most telling character traits, good aim, was exemplified by Deadeye shooting his best friend in the face last year. An event that, unless Bush is as dumb as he looks, probably concerns him more than a little.

A January article by Jason Leopold and Marc Ash at truthout explains how Cheney's Handwritten Notes Implicate Bush in the Plame affair and describes how, like cornered mafiosi rats looking out for number one, the thugs are turning on each other:

Bush has long maintained that he was unaware of attacks by any member of his administration against [former ambassador Joseph] Wilson. The ex-envoy's stinging rebukes of the administration's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence led Libby and other White House officials to leak Wilson's wife's covert CIA status to reporters in July 2003 in an act of retaliation.

But Cheney's notes, which were introduced into evidence [...] during Libby's perjury and obstruction-of-justice trial, call into question the truthfulness of President Bush's vehement denials about his prior knowledge of the attacks against Wilson. The revelation that Bush may have known all along that there was an effort by members of his office to discredit the former ambassador raises the question: Was the president also aware that senior members of his administration compromised Valerie Plame's undercover role with the CIA?

Further, the highly explicit nature of Cheney's comments not only hints at a rift between Cheney and Bush over what Cheney felt was the scapegoating of Libby, but also raises serious questions about potentially criminal actions by Bush. If Bush did indeed play an active role in encouraging Libby to take the fall to protect Karl Rove, as Libby's lawyers articulated in their opening statements, then that could be viewed as criminal involvement by Bush.

[In mid January 2007] Libby's attorney Theodore Wells made a stunning pronouncement during opening statements of Libby's trial. He claimed that the White House had made Libby a scapegoat for the leak to protect Karl Rove - Bush's political adviser and "right-hand man."

If Bush and Cheney were only half as corrupt as it appears they are they'd still deserve to be sharing bunks with wise guys like John Gotti and his crew.

Frank Rich writes in The NYT this morning "Why Libby’s Pardon Is a Slam Dunk":

A president who tries to void laws he doesn’t like by encumbering them with “signing statements” and who regards the Geneva Conventions as a nonbinding technicality isn’t going to start playing by the rules now. His assertion last week that he is “pretty much going to stay out of” the Libby case is as credible as his pre-election vote of confidence in Donald Rumsfeld. The only real question about the pardon is whether Mr. Bush cares enough about his fellow Republicans’ political fortunes to delay it until after Election Day 2008.

Either way, the pardon is a must for Mr. Bush. He needs Mr. Libby to keep his mouth shut. Cheney’s Cheney knows too much about covert administration schemes far darker than the smearing of Joseph Wilson.
...
Ever since all the W.M.D. claims proved false, the administration has pleaded that it was duped by the same bad intelligence everyone else saw. But the nuclear card, the most persistent and gripping weapon in the prewar propaganda arsenal, was this White House’s own special contrivance. Mr. Libby was present at its creation. He knows what Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney knew about the manufacture of this fiction and when they knew it.

Clearly they knew it early on. The administration’s guilt (or at least embarrassment) about its lies in fomenting the war quickly drove it to hide the human price being paid for those lies.
...
Now the “surge” that was supposed to show results by summer is creeping inexorably into an open-ended escalation, even as Moktada al-Sadr’s militia ominously melts away, just as Iraq’s army did after the invasion in 2003, lying in wait to spring a Tet-like surprise. And still, despite Thursday’s breakthrough announcement of a credible Iraq exit blueprint by the House leadership, Congress threatens to dither. While Mr. Bush will no doubt pardon Scooter Libby without so much as a second thought, anyone else in Washington who continues to further this debacle may find it less easy to escape scot-free.

William Rivers Pitt had this verdict in an article at truthout last week:

Mr. Libby is a damned lucky man.

The acts he was convicted of - perjury, false statements and obstruction - were crimes in themselves, to be sure, but were crimes committed to cover up, obscure and bury the truly serious crimes that got this ball rolling in the first place. In short, he was convicted for the cover-up of the actual crimes.

In a nation that prides itself on living by the rule of law, Mr. Libby should have been tried for treason.

It's beginning to appear that, if not by a court of justice, at least in the eyes and minds of reality based people, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have been.