Gag

Under Gonzale's watch, the FBI abused its power to issue National Security Letters. These abuses have not come to light because of the gag order that the letters bring with them: people issued the letters must lie under threat of prosecution about having ever been given one.

One man speaks out. Annonymously.

The patriot act would not have become permanent if the gag order rule were not in place.

It's time we got rid of this insideous peice of legistlation.

Ongoing investigation

Duke Cunningham was brought down by one of the prosecutors that got fired. Her name is Lam. She was in the process of investigating Rep. Jerry Lewis when she got canned.

This scandal is obscene, and yet so very expected.

Every time the President has fought for more power, he has abused it.

Or did his wife send him out on a junket?

Libby hand wrote notes in the margins of Wilson's NYT op-ed. He asks

"Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Ambas to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us?

Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

I'm sure it must have come up in the course of the trial when it was that Libby wrote these notes, but my bet is that he wrote them the day the op-ed hit the stands. If he wrote this note before he talked to Russert, then he lied.

Libby Documents

Sullivan posted this link to the website where the National Security Archive has posted all of the declasified documents that were part of the Libby investigation.

I'm going to rumage through them later.

Today, Pants and I painted the kitchen. The kitchen gets the afternoon sun, and the deep orange had faded to an orangish yellow -- except the parts of the walls covered by pictures. Those were still deep orange. We bought some organish yellow paint yesterday at Sears. It took two coats to cover the dark orange areas and one coat where the faded paint matched the new paint.

Krauthammer's Complicity

The Plame case is too important to let Krauthammer whitewash it as just some prosecutor going bananas over a simple memory failure.

The picture that Krauthammer paints of Libby is of a powerful man deftly handling dozens of issues simultaneously, who has forgotten a minor detail on a minor issue. The minor issue is Ambassador Wilson's op-ed blasting the State of the Union claim that Iraq was close to going nuclear. The minor detail was when Libby learned that Wilson's wife was at the CIA. This is Krauthammer's first deception: "minor" does not describe either the issue or the detail.

Krauthammer's second deception is in painting Russert's testimony as the only detail of the case that actually pinned Libby as a liar. In so doing, he treats the case as a simple he-said-she-said disagreement. The jury looks awfully culpable if they sided with Russert over Libby when all they had to go on was their testimony.

But that blame-the-jury stance is itself deceptive... Libby didn't take the stand at his trial. "He-said-she-said" doesn't work if only one person is couragous enough to say anything!

But lets get back to that second deception before I blast the first.

Krauthammer is ignoring the testimony from Cheney's press aid, Cathie Martin. Martin testified that Libby and Cheney had discussed how to handle the mess over Wilson's op-ed at great length, and had talked about Wilson's wife and her possition at the CIA as being key towards painting Wilson as a bumbling idiot who only got to where he was through nepotism. If your boss is super worried about one man and how to discredit him, do you forget?

FUCK NO!

This now is getting to the Krauthammer's first deception. The downplaying of the importance of Wilson's (AMBASSADOR WILSON's) courageous disagreement with the executive office. In Cheney's world there could be no dissent or everything would unravel.

Krauthammer is ignoring everything that Fitzgerald's suppeneas revealed about the climate of the vice-president's office. Cheney was obssesed with connecting Sadam with Nukes. Anything that could derail that opinon was locked-on for destruction: character assasination (e.g. Paul O'Niel), "expert" disagreement (e.g. Steven Hadley) -- whatever it took.

We know now that Cheney was criminally wrong. Criminally. He was resonsible for the Plame leak. He gave the order. Libby lied to protect his boss from a criminal indictment. That is a crime. You go to jail for crimes. For Krauthammer to argue Libby disserves a pardon requires he ignore the majority of the facts unearthed in Fitzgerald's ivestigation.

And here is where Krauthammer's motives should be examined. I think he feels he needs to get Libby off the hook, or else his own complicity in decieving the country into an unjustified war might land him in jail... well, I doubt jail, but he will find himself fired.

Blame Game

Now is the time to play the blame game. Not six months from now when Libby's appeal has been rejected and he begins his 2 year sentence. Now.

The White House's continued policy of ignoring the Plame case (or as they put it, of not commenting on an ongoing criminal investigation) is absurd at this, the 25th hour.

Libby was convicted. Bush can no longer hide behind his managed media stance of ignoring the bad stuff.

When Katrina hit, the talking point was that it wasn't yet time for the blame game. He said it over and over. He sent out his deputies and they said it over and over. And then people got bored and turned to other issues.

We must not let Bush off the hook. We must fervently reject the managed media stance this administration has taken. They are accountable and we are entitled to an accounting. If they will not give it to us the first time we request it, then we must ask again and again and again. We must not get bored.

Froomkin hits the nail on the head.