'Scooter' Libby gets 2½ years in jail for perjury

"Scooter" Libby was sentenced to two and a half years in jail yesterday for perjury and obstruction of justice in relation to the Iraq war.

And in a typical display of the way that this administration believe that reality is what they say it is, Dick Cheney - the Vice President - has described Libby as "a man of the highest intellect, judgement and personal integrity".

Well, his personal integrity has to be, at the very least suspect, if he is going to jail for perjury and obstructing the course of justice but in Cheney's world the truth is what you say it is. Libby has, in Cheney's mind, shown great "judgement and personal integrity" because - like Gonzales in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee - he decided to pretend that he didn't remember certain things that would have been embarrassing to the Bush administration. And it is no doubt highly admirable to the VP's office that this man has decided to go to the slammer rather than admit that he is protecting the VP.

Let us not forget the crime that Libby is going to jail for. As I said at the time:

"The whole "Scooter" Libby story starts with a lie, indeed, with a tissue of lies. Lies told by an administration determined to remove Saddam at any cost and prepared to "fit the facts around the policy" of removing him.

When Joe Wilson reported the size of the lie told in the President's State of the Union address, the administration took concerted action to silence him, even going as far as to reveal the undercover status of his wife, Valerie Plame, who worked for the CIA.

When it was revealed that a Federal crime had been committed Bush vowed that whoever leaked the name would no longer work for his administration. However, the message that the leaking of Plame's name sent was unmistakable. "Fuck with us at your peril."

This was an action taken by the neo-cons, either because they believed they were untouchable, or perhaps, because they knew that if Wilson and others were allowed to openly discuss the lies that had led to the Iraq war that the public might eventually learn of just how blatantly the evidence had been manipulated."

So that is the reason that Libby faces jail and that is why Cheney describes him as "a man of the highest intellect, judgement and personal integrity".

Cheney admires the fact that Libby has taken the bullet. In a criminal Mafioso-like administration like this one, those become admirable qualities.

Now, of course, there have been cries from the more hysterical parts of the right wing - yes, of course I'm talking about William Kristol - demanding that Libby should be pardoned if for no better reason than, "The Democrats would go crazy."

It would appear a strange way to run a legal system, making decisions basically on the grounds of how much or how little it would enrage your opponents, but from what we've seen from Mr Gonzales on the stands, justice is conducted in a very strange way under this administration. Indeed, President Bush admired the work of Mr Gonzales when he went before the Senate Judiciary Committee and basically acted like a fool in order to take the bullet and not embarrass the boss. This is exactly the same thing that Libby is now doing. And Cheney, like Bush, is applauding Libby for taking the flak and protecting the other criminals behind the scenes.

Indeed, Libby's lawyers went as far as to say that he was "the fall guy" for the administration and there is no reason to disbelieve them, especially as the Vice President - rather than condemning a man found guilty of such a crime - is going to such lengths to applaud him.

And there appears little chance that Libby is going to avoid real jail time as the judge has ruled that he is not going to allow the defence to string out an appeal to keep him from jail. The judge has said that he will rule on this next week.

Libby heard the verdict in the district court in Washington. Judge Walton told him he had to balance Libby's record of service to the country against a need to punish those who lied under oath. He said people occupying high office had a duty not to step over the line. "It's important that we expect and demand a lot from people who put themselves in those positions," he said. "Mr Libby failed to meet that bar."

Minutes earlier, Libby took the stand for the first time to plead for mercy: "It is respectfully my hope that the court will consider along with the jury verdict my whole life." Libby was found guilty by a jury in March but sentencing was delayed until yesterday. Judge Walton, who has a tough reputation imposed the jail sentence, a $250,000 (£125,400) fine and, as a further humiliation, two years' probation at the end of the prison sentence.

Libby lied to a federal investigation into the outing of a former CIA agent, Valerie Plame, an apparent act of revenge by the Bush administration against her husband and anti-war critic Joe Wilson.

Libby sat quietly throughout more than two hours of legal argument before sentence. He had his back to the press and public when the sentence was announced but those round him said he showed no emotion. Calling for leniency - probation rather than prison - his lawyer, Theodore Wells, called him an exceptional public servant.

He read out excerpts from letters by more than 100 figures, including Paul Wolfowitz, another neo-conservative, who was forced out of the World Bank presidency last month. They portrayed him as playing a vital role in events from the end of the cold war and nuclear arms reduction to Ukrainian independence. Mr Wells said: "It is a tragic fall, a tragic fall."

The special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, recommended a three-year sentence. "We need to make the statement that the truth matters ever so much," he said.

I have been accused in the comments section of using the term "liars" too often when talking of this administration, but that is, for me, their defining characteristic. They have always acted as if the truth is what they say it is. Indeed, to this day, the Vice President continues to talk of links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that his own intelligence community have told him are false and yet he continues to take to the airwaves and spout what are obvious lies.

So there is something predictable about a member of this administration being jailed for lying, just as there is nothing remotely surprising about Gonzales facing impeachment charges for misleading the Senate.

This is an administration that has repeatedly said things that have turned out to be untrue. In some cases, like Iraq, they have claimed to believe what they told us at the time and to have been surprised to discover that what they were saying was false. However, given the tendency of this administration to state things that are demonstrably false as true - "there is progress in Iraq" - one would have to be willing to give them an awful lot of rope to believe that they didn't know at the time that what they were saying was bollocks.

That is why the Vice President is applauding Libby as he goes to jail. For if Libby did tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, there are many of us who believe that the Vice President would soon be following him.

UPDATE:

Anything They Say links to a fabulous speech which Mark Danner gave to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10. It seems to sum up rather well the attitude of the entire Bush administration towards rhetoric and reality:

For we have today an administration that not only is radical - unprecedentedly so - in its attitudes toward rhetoric and reality, toward words and things, but is willing, to our great benefit, to state this attitude clearly. I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush administration, put forward by the proverbial "unnamed administration official" and published in the New York Times Magazine by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004. Here, in Suskind's recounting, is what that "unnamed administration official" told him:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community", which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality". I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

I must admit to you that I love that quotation; indeed, with your permission, I would like hereby to nominate it for inscription over the door of the Rhetoric Department, akin to Dante's welcome above the gates of Hell, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." Both admonitions have an admirable bluntness. These words from "Bush's Brain" - for the unnamed official speaking to Suskind seems to have been none other than the selfsame architect of the aircraft-carrier moment, Karl Rove, who bears that pungent nickname - these words sketch out with breathtaking frankness a radical view in which power frankly determines reality, and rhetoric, the science of flounces and folderols, follows meekly and subserviently in its train. Those in the "reality-based community" - those such as we - are figures a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: power has made reality its bitch.

Given such sweeping claims for power, it is hard to expect much respect for truth; or perhaps it should be "truth" - in quotation marks - for, when you can alter reality at will, why pay much attention to the idea of fidelity in describing it? What faith, after all, is owed to the bitch that is wholly in your power, a creature of your own creation?

I think that sums up their attitude perfectly.

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