You would seem to address me as if I am one of the partisanists you are railing against. Take heed that I am not and I have been very careful in what I have said and the conclusions that may be drawn from my word.
What I said is in response to the part where you said to go and get a charge. That’s what master Fitzgerald is doing. The investigation was opened in 2003 at the urging of Ashcroft’s Deputy, one Mr. Comey and it is still open. If it were closed we could agree or agree to disagree about it’s results. We’re not there yet.
Verily that will happen. Either: Mr. Libby has to stop obstructing justice first, or it must be found that the whole thing is a dead end and no crimes were committed and that is when it will end. Of course, Libby may go up the river for lying even if he isn’t lying to cover anything up. The book has already been thrown at him for a specific crime he will answer for in court. I hope he gets a speedy trial.
I never said it was anything different.
No it wouldn’t be. I see that as the correct position of course.
But if the investigation is eventually unobstructed and Offical A through Official Z are questioned as witnesses in a court of law on public record, it very well could be. It is quite likely senor Cheney will be called upon to testify.
If I understand you here, your “it very well could” means you think that proving this charge could prove that Bush and his administration lied to get us to war. I suppose that there’s always the possibility that someone’s testimony will prove something indirectly related to the charge. But proving someone leaked classified information to unlawfully out a CIA operative will prove one thing: that someone leaked classified information to unlawfully out a CIA operative, period. If someone wants to assign some moral value to it, I believe the most one could assume would be that the administration is peopled by ruthless pricks who go after their enemies without regard for the law.
Thanks for the link. I hadn’t read that article, but I did read the write-up in the NY Times. It may not be the impartial “authoritative reading” I was looking for, but at least I now know who fanned the flames.
I find it interesting the way the Times treats the evidentiary weight of the memo. Also note its almost cursory description of how Plame is mentioned:
Contrast that with the Post’s take:
See what I mean? Shades of gray instead of black and white. The Times seems to imply the memo is inconclusive at best, but a possible source of Plame’s identity, as long as the reader is able to connect the dots. The Post thinks any idiot should have been able to tell she was covert. Neither article tells how many pages the memo contained, nor how far into it the paragraph was that referenced “Wilson’s wife”. Short of reading the actual memo, which will probably be Government’s Exhibit A in the near future, we’re left with reporters’ impressions, and that’s not enough for me.
Interesting. Given Cheney’s history with the Agency, others have suggested exactly that - that it was a slap back at what he perceived as a pretty effective “outing” operation of their own, sending Wilson to Niger knowing there was nothing to find to bolster the yellowcake story. What ever happened to “How can you prove a negative?”
Yeah, my gut says this went further than either side ever intended. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that presidents come and go, but the bureaucracy carries on.
I’m a bit distracted here… Erin Brockovich is on TNT. Big teeth – you gotta love ‘em.
I’ve yet to find any authoritative reading on whether or not she was “covert”, which is the bar that must be met for all this talk of treason to amount to anything. If you have one, I would seriously welcome it. From what I understand, her assignment at the time of the “outing” was as a functionary at Langley. Had a parking space and everything. Not exactly Bond. But at least I’m trying to keep an open mind and not assume you get your news from Al Franken.
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Her status was classified. Attempts by the right to trivialize her status or mock her job do not change the fact that her status was classified and that it was illegal to reveal her status… Mealy-mouthed nitpicking about the difference between “covert” and “classified” is a wasted exercise. An agent does not have to be officially classified as “covert” in order for it to be illegal to blow her cover. If it comes out that anyone intentionally did that, it’s a crime and a pretty vicious one at that. Proving intention is the hard part, but let’s be real…it was intentional.
Why, it’s apparently an asinine one. I thought it fairly obvious that what one says to the press and what one presents as evidence can and should be two different things.
This is the first I’ve heard it stated that simply. Others have complicated the issue by implying that particular specific motives are required to warrant the charge.
On the former, we agree. On the latter, we shall see. That wasn’t so hard.
An investigation was opened on the grounds that a specific law regarding outing undercover agents has been broken. As you can see, any other broken laws the investigation opens up or uncovers instantly become fair game. If the investigation manages to pierce the obstruction in its way [as opposed to ending, fruitless] lots of folks will be made to testify and they may be asked lots of things as to why V. Plame had to be outed & why J. Wilson had to be discredited. This will be key to establishing criminal intent, which is a burden of the initial crime Fitzy is fishing for.
You might find that it’s because of what Joseph Wilson said regarding how or why the U.S. invaded Iraq.
I didn’t in fact assign any moral values. I am trying to have a discussion about what is going on without partisanist rancor. I already know what my opinion is about the administration and it’s not really key to my opinion of what’s going on.
That’s my point. You could prove this conclusively and that doesn’t lead to the conclusion that the administration lied about the war, though, again, it’s inarguable that testimony could emerge that leads to charges in other “crimes.” I’m not even saying they didn’t; I’m saying it’s not the charge and one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. Hell, let’s concede for a moment that this is a given–a deliberate leak broke a law with the intention of retribution and it’s beyond doubt. Explain the syllogism that leads us to conclude that now we know the Bush administration lied to get us into war (again, without a deus ex machina scenario that supposes someone on the stand proves this as well).
For example, why couldn’t it have been a simple, ruthless attack on an enemy? Let me state it another way: the prosecution need not prove the Bush administration lied to get us into war to prove the charge of an unlawful leak–in fact, if that’s the hurdle, they may as well give up now.
Well it’s an interesting argument to make. The opposition you are looking for, particularly on the “morally” point will be along shortly.
Not long ago on this board it was vociferously and vehemently argued that a member of the US Senate, Kerry by name, had done acts to merit the title traitor, no matter the legal definition of ‘treason.’ Twiddling pettifoggery, the argument went, could not rebutt the grave disservice the Senator had done his nation.
The parallels with Mr Lewis are plain, but I’ll leave the argument to be fully developed by its author, when he arrives.
Because a simple ruthless attack on an enemy would have been simpler. Why did the administration feel any need to discredit Wilson?
If I were Bush, two summers ago I would have said this:
“So Joseph Wilson thinks the week he spent sipping highballs in Nigeria’s presidential mansion compares to the ongoing work of the British intelligence services? That’s cute. I for one trust our friends the British and preventing nuclear proliferation and terrorism are of the utmost importance to my Administration.”
It turns out Sisme, the Italian intelligence service had a hand in forging these documents, which lead for Cheney to ask the CIA for some infos.
Now, we could say “Hahaha you stupid mongs!” to our Administration for believing Italian knockoffs but when they must ruthlessly discredit rather than politely disagree with naysayers on this issue, it puts forth the possibility or probability that they may have known what they were dealing with – what evidence or lack thereof they were operating from.
Also, it doesn’t matter if Wilson went to Nigeria at the behest of his wife, his grandma, or his neighbor’s talking dog, what he found is understood today as the truth. The Administration’s behavior reflects to me that they knew this and it makes their attempt to discredit him look that much more sinister.
I agree that legally, perjury is perjury, murder is murder, bribery is bribery, and so on and so forth. I also know that we can construct two sets of particulars around any of these equivalent charges that we can nearly all agree reflect vastly different moral wrongs.
For me it has meaning that for one of the incidents of perjury presented for discussion here, absent the perjury, there was no larger wrong committed (given a believe that getting head outside of a marital relationship is a wrong only for the participants), whereas in the other, there was a demonstrable wrong committed.
I also find it amusingly ironic that the argument put forward is “a legal charge of perjury is equal to a legal charge of perjury” when in only one circumstance was there a legal charge of perjury. The argument must be “a legal charge of perjury is equivalent to a political charge of perjury,” which is a much more debatable assertion.
Finally, for those who would point to Clinton’s transcript and say “Yeah, see, he did lie under oath,” (a position I am much more sympathetic to than I used to be), you are still appealing to an extrajudicial interpretation of a set of particulars in the absence of a legal charge.
What I find most disturbing is, in THIS case, the perjury and obstruction charges came from the outing of a CIA agent, in an effort to discredit or intimidate someone who had information that calls into question the entire justification for war. Wilson’s editorial said there was no Niger yellow cake. The big speech by Bush, continued to claim there was yellow cake and a viable nuclear program in Iraq (and other things too). In that speech, I will asume, I think fairly, Bush and his people already knew this, and continued to mislead us all. While perjury is perjury, obstruction is obstruction, the underlying motives are NOT equivalent. In the Clinton case, it was about what should have been a personal matter, after the other investigations had fallen flat. In this case, it is a national matter. It calls into question everything we have been told since 9/11 and possibly before. Looking back, Bush wanted war and was not letting anything get in the way. Wilson was in the way. If Libby is convicted, there will still be questions that must be answered, and to my mind, they are far more serious than the perjury/obstruction itself. As Fitzgerald himself said, the problem with perjury and obstruction is, you end up not being sure what is true and what you need to do. Finally, just for thought, if everything was on the level, there would be no need to lie to the grand jury.
The charge of “false equivalence” is not (or rather should not be) intended to describe a comparison made between two sets of actions, results or circumstances which can be described without equivocation using the same technical* term as a label. For instance, there is nothing technically incorrect in the statement “Both Clinton and Libby were charged by their accusers of perjury and obstruction of justice,” nor is it slippery rhetoric to declare that both sets of accusations focus on the same legal and moral transgression and are therefore equivalent in their legal and moral effect.
And were the argument to begin and end there, no false equivalence would have been drawn. Clinton lied to investigators during the course of an official (and legally prosecuted) inquiry. So, allegedly, did Libby.
When that argument is expanded to draw a conclusion equating the broader legal and moral circumstances surrounding the political scenarios involved, then it becomes fallacious very quickly. And this is an objection I believe the OP does not effectively counter; that the “Monicagate” and “Plamegate” scenarios cannot be morally or legally equated by drawing a false analogy between the two sets of perjury/obstruction charges, or by attempting to induce tu qoque inferences that one political witchhunt strongly implies a similar witchhunt from the other side of the aisle.
In the first case, the analogy can be shown to be false by expanding the scope of analysis beyond the accusations into the the legal (or moral) specifics of the contexts in which the charges were made, and then examining the many differences between the contexts. (Note that this would neither exculpate nor incriminate either party.)
In the second case, the inference of false equivalence can be shown to be a fallacy of undistributed middle (iow, similar charges resulting from two different investigations can shed no light on the character of either investigation), and that the inference is based on an irrelevant petitio prinicpii (iow, the question “are strong partisan interests involved in both cases?” leads to a conclusion -“partisan interests are involved in both cases”- which simply restates the question and distracts from the more appropriate question “what greater transgressions were being investigated, discovery of which might have been obstructed in either case by the alleged perjury?”)
*“Technical term” meaning one which has a clear legal or scientific meaning as defined by the appropriate and recognized community of “experts” in the particular field of application.
You say there is “nothing technically incorrect.” Is there something incorrect about it in a nontechnical sense?
But the argument does in fact end there.
I certainly have not attempted to draw any broader conclusions. In fact, that is what I am arguing against.
The broader conclusion that I am arguing against, is specifically the fallacy that because Clinton perjured himself concerning infidelity that is somehow less of a crime than the perjury Libby is accused of.
The point of my OP is that Perjury is a crime against the courts and the justice system.
I have made neither of those arguments. Why would I seek to counter a rebuttal to an argument I haven’t made. In fact, trying to equate the two scandals would serve against my thesis.
Since the rest of your post concerns rebutting arguments I haven’t made, I can safely not respond to it… one hopes.
FTR, I beleive the seriousness of the allegations being investigated against Libby et al, are greater than the seriousness of the sexual harassment suit as the former pertains to National Security.
Ahh, how I long for the days when the most dangerous thing about our president was his libido and when all the explosions were in his pants [instead of Asia].
Nope. I was trying to be precise in my language describing the sense of the statement. One could, of course, draw incorrect inferences from the statement, which is what the rest of my post addressed.
Then the rest of my post is not directed toward you. I was simply trying to define where and how a genuinely false equivalence would be most likely portrayed in this particular case. It’s my expectation based on experience that broader conclusions will in fact be drawn -and vigorously argued- by others. Perhaps my expectation is uncharitable and foolish. I will be happy to have been proved foolish when such arguments do not appear.
Of course. And that is the very point which a hypothetical partisan might, through lack of rigorous logic, unfairly obscure in a tangle of false analogies, etc. That you have not done so doesn’t relieve me of the sense that others might not be as fair and honest.
My take on the OP is that the Clinton didn’t lie under oath to hide a personal matter, he lied under oath to hide a personnel matter and that personnel matters are quite serious. Clinton’s reckless behavior with a subordinate had the potential to be the mother of all sexual harrassment suits. Any county prosecutor who did with an intern what Clinton did and then lied about it under oath would’ve been in a world of trouble, and so the furor over what Clinton did was justified IMHO.
Libby’s alleged perjury is equally serious of course.
My apologies. I had thought I was replying in kind to the suggestion that the attitude most of us expressing concern here is nothing more than partisan gloating, a direct accusation about character itself.
A. Yes, there is a lot of other shit under the rock, that’s why “this Libby thing” exists.
B. What other shit are you referring to “like in the case with Clinton”?
It isn’t. The law is, for the most part anyway, a subset of ethics. There is some overlap. Conduct can most certainly be unethical, immoral, repugnant, and still legal. My issue here is with the OP’s attempt to avoid any such discussion outside the narrower realm of ethics that is codified by the law.
For instance, the presumption that Clinton is guilty of perjury, do you mean? Oh, wait, that *was * alleged.
Legal acts cannot be assessed outside of context?
I noted that we are in the court of public opinion. Do you insist on a conviction before you think anything wrong has been done at all? Is your definition of ethicality synonymous with the law? I’m really trying to understand where that comes from.
Visceral, is it? Unthought, unfounded, emotional, not derived from fact, how do you mean that? Would you care to clarify, or just leave that discussion of the character of those who disagree as it stands?
But it’s still visceral, is it? Or could it be that “the invective pales in comparison” is because it is founded on substance?
Wrong wrong wrong. “The future of the Republic” has nothing to do with Libby’s indictment and a great deal to do with this President’s lack of interest in reality combined with adolescent machismo and fundamental irresponsibility. The Libby case is just a minor fallout from the real, fundamental problems here. It doesn’t actually matter what happens to him now, and it really never did; he hasn’t been a decisionmaker of significance in the effort to justify this war.
While we’re discussing false equivalences, btw, one more might be suggesting that the Libby indictment was the *result * of its political effect rather than the reverse, as in the ultimately-exculpatory Clinton investigation.
