Lewis “Scooter” Libby is dropping the appeal of his criminal conviction in the CIA leak case, his lawyer tells the Associated Press.
“We remain firmly convinced of Mr. Libby’s innocence,” attorney Theodore Wells tells the wire service. “However, the realities were, that after five years of government service by Mr. Libby and several years of defending against this case, the burden on Mr. Libby and his young family of continuing to pursue his complete vindication are too great to ask them to bear.”
President Bush commuted Libby’s 30-month prison sentence in July after a jury convicted him of lying to federal agents. They were investigating the source of leaks that identified an undercover CIA officer who was married to a former diplomat who had criticized the invasion of Iraq.
At her daily briefing today, White House spokesperson Dana Perino refused to speculate whether Scooter Libby would be pardoned over the upcoming holidays.
On KCRW’s “Left, Right and Center” political chat show last Friday, Tony Blankley, of all people — the former chief of staff for Newt Gingrich and editor of the Washington Times, the rightwing newspaper owned by cult leader Sun Yung Moon — joined Arianna Huffington and Matt Miller in tearing apart the speech on religion Mitt Romney delivered last week:
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: There was also something else, which was the statement in the speech — the statement that freedom requires religion and religion requires freedom.
(Laughter among the co-hosts.)
MATT MILLER: What about Christianity and the Romans?
HUFFINGTON: You wonder, how was that allowed to stay for the final draft. I mean, what does it even mean?
TONY BLANKLEY: It was a wonderfully drafted phrase, even though it was historical nonsense.
HUFFINGTON: Historic nonsense and current nonsense. Also the fact that he mentioned the name, the word “Mormon” once compared to the number of times JFK mentioned [Catholicism] was a real indicator that he was still not entirely clear that this was not going to have some definite public relations disadvantages for him.
BLANKLEY: I’ve just got to say that Arianna picked on exactly the right phrase. It was such ahistoric nonsense. Not only does Christianity thrive under the repression of the Roman emperors but the whole history of Judaism — you know, this little religion has thrived over, what, 5,000 and a half years, and they have rarely ever experienced any freedom. The idea that you can’t — that religion has to exist only in freedom is just historic nonsense. It’s just silly.
Exception should be taken to Romney’s corollary statement that freedom requires religion, as well. At least three of our Founding Fathers — Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine — were irreligious, and there is ample evidence they understood freedom fairly well (leaving aside the very large matter of Jefferson’s dependence on slavery). In any case, they and others did not “require” religion in order to lay the groundwork for America’s experiment with personal liberty.
Why Hasn’t Mukasey Called for Preservation of Evidence in Torture Video Scandal?
Within hours, if not minutes, after the CIA announced it destroyed two videos made in 2002 of its agents torturing al Qaida suspects, Attorney Gen. Michael Mukasey should have ordered the CIA and all federal agencies to preserve any evidence related to the filming of torture sessions involving terror suspects.
The silence and inaction on the preservation of evidence in this unfolding scandal by Bush’s new attorney general suggests what many suspected — that Michael Mukasey, like his predecessor Alberto Gonzales, is more concerned with the political preservation of his boss than he is the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States.
Over the weekend, the urgent need for this order was underscored by the development that other videos of other torture sessions may exist:
Prosecutor in trial of 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui informs judges that he viewed two videos of al-Qaida suspects’ interrogations two months ago that government told court in 2003 it didn’t have — and CIA chief said were destroyed
A letter by a Virginia-based U.S. attorney to a federal appeals court appears to contradict CIA Director Michael Hayden’s public statements on the destruction of hundreds of hours of video footage of “extreme” interrogations of suspected al-Qaida operatives by strongly indicating that at least two of the videos still exist.
Charles Rosenberg, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, wrote that his office viewed two videotapes of CIA interrogations of al-Qaida suspects as recently as September 19 and October 18 of this year — contrary to Hayden’s statement that the tapes were destroyed in 2005.
The CIA’s announcement that the videos had been destroyed, brought to mind the revelation by the White House last spring that as many as 5 million inter-office emails had been “lost.” It is likely that emails contained evidence that top Bush officials, including especially Karl Rove, engaged in a conspiracy to leak, and then cover up the leak, of the secret identity of Valerie Wilson, a CIA specialist in the black market for terror weapons.
Anyone who is familiar with the fundamentals of data storage can attest that it takes a concerted effort to “lose” data stored on hard drives. This is especially so for emails, which are stored on hard drives of both the sender and the receiver as well as on outgoing and incoming email servers.
The videos, like the emails, were presumably in digital format rather than old-fashioned videotape. If so, it is more than likely that multiple backup copies were created, which increases the chance that additional copies could still exist on a disk somewhere.
Of course, the CIA has had plenty of time to track down and obliterate backup copies of the torture videos, just as White House officials have had more than sufficient time now — eight months at least — to scour and wipe clean the hard drives on which the 5 million emails were stored.
This returns us to the main question: Where is Mukasey? His silence and inaction on the preservation of evidence in this unfolding scandal suggests what many suspected — that Michael Mukasey, like his predecessor Alberto Gonzales, is more concerned with the political preservation of his boss than he is the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States.
During a visit to Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s “madrasa” in Virginia, a student asks “President” Huckabee what is behind his surge in the polls:
MIKE HUCKABEE: There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped the little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people. And that’s the only way our campaign could be doing what it’s doing. I’m not being facetious, nor am I trying to be trite. There literally are thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much. And it has. And it defies all explanation. It has confounded the pundits, and I’m enjoying every minute of their trying to figure it out. And until they look at it from an experience just beyond human they’ll never figure it out. And that’s probably just as well.
True opinions can only prevail if the facts to which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.
— Walter Lippman (1889-1974) American writer, editor
The Republican Party’s effort to unilaterally award itself with 20 of California’s 55 Electoral College votes next year has failed to reach its fundraising goals for a second time:
Ballot initiatives tend to fail if California voters suspect the proposition has a hidden agenda.
A proposed initiative that drew national attention for its potential to affect next year’s presidential election will not appear on the June ballot, organizers said Thursday.
Republican backers of the measure, which could have tilted the presidential contest toward the GOP nominee by changing how California awards electoral votes, conceded that they were unable to raise sufficient funds.
Dave Gilliard, the manager of the current campaign, expressed bewilderment over the fact that more GOP fatcats did not pour money into the campaign.
“I was surprised that more people that finance these types of efforts didn’t step forward…We had strong supporters and good supporters but didn’t come anywhere close to making the budget,” Gilliard told the Los Angeles Times.
Gilliard’s “surprise” is itself surprising. GOP big money donors know, just as certainly Gilliard must know, that ballot initiatives tend to fail if California voters suspect the proposition has a hidden agenda.
The stated intent of Gilliard’s initiative was to make the California system “fair.” In fact, the real purpose was to give about 40 percent of the state’s Electoral College votes to the 2008 Republican nominee.
In October, a similar measure failed when the campaign manager discovered that its sole donation had been laundered through a front group to disguise the donor’s identity as a campaign chair and fundraiser for GOP presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani.
What little credibility Bush, and, by extension, the United States, had on Iran among our allies and other stakeholders in the Middle East has evaporated.
Wednesday night, George Bush’s spokesperson Dana Perino was forced to acknowledge in an email that Bush had been lying to the American people both about the status of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and about when he was informed that Iran’s nuclear program had been suspended.
Yesterday, however, when she asked if Bush was “candid” about what he knew and when he knew it, Perino answered, “Yes, he was.” Then, as proof of his candor, she launched into this tortured peroration:
If you look at the rest of that sentence, what the President — the President was clearly told that there was new information that was coming in, but he wasn’t told the details of it. And the President was also told that the intelligence community was going to need to go back and check out to find out if it’s true. What I said is that [Director of National Intelligence Mike] McConnell told the President, if the new information turns out to be true, what we thought we knew for sure is right: Iran does, in fact, have a covert nuclear weapons program, but it may be suspended. He said that there were many streams of information that were coming in that could be potentially in conflict. They didn’t have a lot of confidence in the information yet.
When challenged on the fact that her parsing did not square with what Bush actually said, Perino waved off the gap in credibility with this obviously scripted-in-advance bit of tripe:
I can see where you could see that the President could have been more precise in that language, but the President was being truthful.
The emphasis on “truthful” is hers. (And she will trot out the “he could have been more precise” nonsense twice more in the session.)
The White House press corps was refreshingly aggressive in putting Perino through her paces. As the session wore on, she sounded increasingly like her predecessor, Scott McClellan, in a skirt, deploying McClellan’s usual tricks — holding forth at length to answer a simple question and changing the subject whenever possible — in order to avoid producing a sound bite. On the other hand, she couldn’t entirely avoid that fact that Bush lied:
Q Dana, but listen to what he said: “He didn’t tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze.” Was the President told that there was a possibility that Iran’s nuclear program could be suspended? That’s what you said he was told.
MS. PERINO: Yes, the President was told that there is new information [in August]…
Meanwhile, in the real world, no one — except increasingly desperate neo-cons and Bush-cult dead-enders — believes Perino, Bush or Cheney on this matter. What little credibility Bush, and, by extension, the United States, had on Iran among our allies and other stakeholders in the Middle East has evaporated. And rightly so, why should any foreign government put stock in anything the Bush administration has to say now?
Our only hope is that no serious world crisis erupts until the United States changes leadership in 13 months, and, presumably — hopefully — a normal president and administration take charge at long last.
Trump and the Iranians seem to be in different realities,
Though they share a callousness toward the war’s casualties.
Is Trump insane
Or just insanely vain?
And how can we extract ourselves from his “Quagmire of the Vanities?”
“If any politician wants to get mothers on their side, they should adopt this issue. It’s such an obvious electoral winner. And what I’ve learned is there is no force in the universe stronger than mothers trying to protect their kids.”
— Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, quoted by Politico, on the threats posed by social media and artificial intelligence.
“There are a lot of Ukrainian drones in the air. It would be dangerous.”
— Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, quoted by the Associated Press, when President Trump asked him if he would accept Moscow as a venue for peace talks.
“Years before Natalie Harp became a key White House aide to President Donald Trump, she flooded her Twitter feed with posts demonstrating extraordinary devotion to him on January 6, 2021,” CNN reports. “Harp posted more than 150 tweets that day, urging Republicans to ‘FIGHT FOR TRUMP’ as he began his speech near the White House. She echoed the president’s talking points that the election was stolen, and amplified rhetoric of his allies, who also sought to undermine the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election win. Harp’s X account appears suspended. It’s unclear when her account was taken down, and whether she or the platform removed her posts.”
“The number of U.S. service members wounded since the start of the Iran war has passed 750, according to the Defense Department’s war casualty database,” CNN reports.
“The U.S. State Department announced on Monday that it has revoked more than 175,000 visas during President Donald Trump’s administration so far,” Fox News reports.
President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office, Alternet reports. This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget.
A new Emerson College survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%. President Trump holds a 39% job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57%.
