Placing Libby Above The Law (by David Corn of The Nation, via TomPaine)

Placing Libby Above The Law
David Corn
March 07, 2007



David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation and the co-author, along with Michael Isikoff, of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. He is covering the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial for The Nation.

Over three years ago, on the morning of July 14, 2003, I picked up The Washington Post and did something I don't always do: I read Robert Novak's column.

It was about the controversy concerning George W. Bush's prewar claim that Iraq had been uranium-shopping in Africa and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's charge that the White House had twisted this intelligence to hype the case for war. A few sentences in the middle of the column caught my eye: Novak was reporting that Wilson's wife—Valerie Plame—was a CIA “operative on weapons of mass destruction.” I knew Joseph Wilson. In the months before the invasion of Iraq, we had become Green Room acquaintances, seeing each other at the Fox News Washington bureau. As two of the few commentators questioning the wisdom of launching a war against Iraq, we had bonded. I had even persuaded Wilson—who joked he was an establishment type of guy—to write an article slamming the neoconservatives for my home base, The Nation .

When I saw the reference to his wife as a CIA spy, I called Wilson and asked about that. He was livid about the column. He would neither confirm nor deny anything. But, he said, if the information in the Novak column was accurate—if she were a CIA operative—then her cover had been blown and that would have serious consequences. If the information was wrong, then she had been falsely branded a spy. That also would have serious consequences. Two days later I wrote a column for The Nation's website that was the first article to suggest that the two anonymous administration officials who had told Novak about Valerie Wilson might have violated a little-known law called the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a felony for a government official to disclose knowingly identifying information about an undercover intelligence officer.

Some credit or blame me for all that followed. Some Bush-backing commentators and bloggers have whipped up conspiracy theories involving me—most fancifully that Wilson and I somehow plotted to make the leak even worse in order to damage the Bush-Cheney White House. Recently, Victoria Toensing suggested that I had enabled Wilson to mislead the public about his wife's covert status perhaps so he could obtain book and movie contracts. This has all been part of a right-wing effort to distract and distort—and to diminish the significance of the leak and the criminal case.

Ideological Loyalties

This ongoing campaign kicked into high gear on Tuesday, when the jury rendered a four-count guilty verdict in the obstruction of justice trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Two hours after the verdict was announced, the National Review posted an editorial demanding that George W. Bush pardon Libby. The trial, NR 's editors proclaimed, “proved only one thing: A White House aide became the target of a politicized prosecution.” The magazine denounced the “partisans” who had “pounced on” the Novak column, and it argued, “A good man has paid a very heavy price for the Left's fevers, the media's scandal-mongering and President Bush's failure to unify his own administration.” .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/03/07/placing_libby_above_the_law.php