No Justice Here

A fraud has been committed and we the public are the victims.

Spending millions of our dollars and in the end, no one has been convicted of outing Plame...and why would they?
There were absolutely no national security issues with Plame. She was a paper shuffler, a high paid secretary.
And everyone in DC knew who she was and what she did for a living.

A crime was committed but it is the not the crime prosecuted, it’s the wholesale fraud that the Libby case has anything at all to do with justice, national security, or even perjury.

Democrats and Bush-bashers in the media are chortling with glee, and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has a high-level scalp on his belt.

Scooter Libby's.

It might not have been the scalp he wanted, but it was the one he got.

Thus ends (pending appeals) a 38-month investigation into the so-called Plamegate case.

Despite the jury's guilty verdict yesterday on four of five counts, it's fair to say that Fitzgerald added nothing to what was well known about the question that ostensibly prompted this probe in the first place: Who leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson's name to columnist Robert Novak?

The answer, as Fitzgerald knew for three years, was then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage - in an off-hand conversation, not a leak.

And since Armitage was a critic of the Iraq war, that pretty much shot down any suggestion that the White House had deliberately sought to "out" Plame in order to sabotage her husband's public criticism of Bush's Iraq policy.

So what was this all about?

Scoring points against Bush.

That much is obvious, given prosecutor Fitzgerald's conduct during Libby's trial.

It's not just that his closing argument was blatantly political, charging that Libby's boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, had orchestrated the leak of Plame's name in order to discredit her husband.

In fact, Fitzgerald throughout the case seemed to violate a central rule set down by the judge: Valerie Plame Wilson's actual status at the CIA was wholly irrelevant to the charges against Libby. Whether or not she was a covert agent - meaning disclosure of her name might be a crime - didn't matter.

Yet Fitzgerald broadly suggested that Libby had been "discussing something . . . that could lead to people being killed."

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid was quick to hail yesterday's verdict, saying: "It's about time someone in the Bush administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics."

But nothing at the trial even hinted at the administration having manipulated intelligence.

In the end, the jury seemed wholly confused by the case. Indeed, just an hour before delivering its verdict, after 10 days of deliberations, the jurors were sending out notes trying to figure out precisely what Libby was accused of having done.

Maybe the jury was less interested in that little detail than in just going home.

Taken at face value, the verdict means that the jury refused to believe Scooter Libby's claim of having a bad memory - though the witnesses against him all showed equally bad, even conflicting, recollections about the same event.

Libby's lawyers yesterday confidently predicted he'll be vindicated on appeal.

He shouldn't have to wait.

President Bush should make things right - by pardoning Libby.

Sure, he'd take a lot of political heat for it. But Libby was in the dock because of politics - and turnabout is fair play.

Free Scooter Libby.