WASHINGTON -
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney authorized Cheney's top aide to launch a counterattack of leaks against administration critics on
Iraq by feeding intelligence information to reporters, according to court papers citing the aide's testimony in the
CIA leak case.
In a court filing, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald stopped short of accusing Cheney of authorizing his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, to leak the CIA identity of
Valerie Plame.
He didn't have to, though - we all know that was the case. We knew it from the beginning that that lying, sick, murderous bastard had something to do with it.
But the prosecutor, detailing the evidence he has gathered, raised the possibility that the vice president was trying to use Plame's CIA employment to discredit her husband, administration critic Joseph Wilson. Cheney, according to an indictment against Libby, knew that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA as early as June 12, 2003, more than a month before that fact turned up in a column by Robert Novak.
Fitzgerald quoted Libby as saying he was authorized to tell New York Times reporter Judith Miller that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure" uranium. Fitzgerald said Libby told him it "was the only time he recalled in his government experience when he disclosed a document to a reporter that was effectively declassified by virtue of the president's authorization that it be disclosed."
Except he "declassified" something that was of interest to our national security. Maybe the right wing doesn't get this, but I do: Plame was a NOC agent working undercover. When these idiots, these bastards wanted to get their war, they had to discredit someone who knew they were lying about their facts (fruitless mission that that is - you'd have to discredit everyone in the country who realizes that it was a lie, and that's millions upon millions of people), and so they exposed someone working in the interests of national security, just because they wanted their precious oil money.
The process was so secretive that other Cabinet-level officials did not know about it, according to the court papers, which point to Bush and Cheney as setting in motion a leak campaign to the press that ended in Plame's blown cover.
In 2003, when the public furor erupted over the disclosure of a CIA operative's status, Bush said he wanted to get to the bottom of the affair. "I want to know the truth," he said at the time.
You knew the truth, you lying ass! You wanted the truth drug behind a shed and shot!
Libby's testimony puts the president and the vice president in the awkward position of authorizing leaks. Both men have long said they abhor such practices, so much so that the administration has put in motion criminal investigations at their behest to hunt down leakers.
I can bet you right now that nobody's going to go after them. The left has little power in Washington, and the right is too enslaved by Bush and his cronies and his business buddies and the money going right into their pockets to try and let justice be done. Fuck justice, they're getting paid, who needs justice?
The sooner that all the players in this farce, this charade of good government, are perp-walked out of Washington and put in prison for the rest of their lives (including Bush, Cheney, Libby, and the Bush-ass-kisser Judy Miller), the sooner that we can get back to the way things ought to be.
You might remember the way things ought to be - we had a damn good example of it about ten years ago.
