Scooter Libby: A Damned Lucky Man

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former White House Aide and Chief of Staff to VP Dick Cheney, has been sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000 by Judge Walton.

On March 08 William Rivers Pitt of truthout posted the following editorial:

Lucky Libby
By William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t, March 08, 2007

Mr. Libby is a damned lucky man.

The acts he was convicted of - perjury, false statements and obstruction - were crimes in themselves, to be sure, but were crimes committed to cover up, obscure and bury the truly serious crimes that got this ball rolling in the first place. In short, he was convicted for the cover-up of the actual crimes.

In a nation that prides itself on living by the rule of law, Mr. Libby should have been tried for treason.
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Mr. Libby - along with Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Stephen Hadley, Condi Rice and a slew of others - was an instrumental member of the cadre that sold the American people an outrageous raft of lies regarding the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
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The lies promulgated by Mr. Libby led directly to the deaths of 3,185 American soldiers and the wounding of between 47,000 and 53,000 more soldiers. This amounts to between a third and a fourth of the entire active combat force of the United States military.

The lies promulgated by Mr. Libby led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the maiming of thousands more, and the creation of a sectarian civil war in that nation whose effects will be generational in impact.
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Mr. Libby's lies helped get a lot of people killed, helped undermine our ability to defend ourselves against the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and helped midwife a war that cuts us all to the quick with every passing day. If that isn't treason, then treason simply does not exist as an actionable criminal act.

Thank you, Mr. Pitt. Libby is a damned lucky man, indeed. And his employers are damned men, in my opinion and the opinion of most Americans, and in the opinion of most of the rest of the world.

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Cross posted at Edgeing