Reply #4: Babylon Sister, your cut and paste is garbled because DU edits out any

[Peace Patriot]

material enclosed by brackets. So all the explanatory connections are missing. I suggest you cut and paste again, as a comment, and replace the brackets with parentheses.

The article itself is not garbled, and is well worth reading. Leopold is absolutely correct about Well's statements and Fitzgerald's. I read them as first transcribed by Firedoglake--quite good live transcription--but Truthout.org has apparently obtained the court recorder's transcription. In any case, it was very clear what each side said. And this is why people who have been following the case closely expect more from Fitzgerald (--possibly a GJ report naming Cheney as "unindicted co-conspirator, and maybe Bush as well--and giving the matter over to Congress--that's my guess). The trial revealed strong evidence against Cheney (and some on Bush), and, in his closing, Fitzgerald pointed strongly at Cheney, in discussing Libby's motives for lying and state of mind leading up to the lies. He lied, a) because, prior to speaking to the FBI, he had learned that outing Plame/Brewster-Jennings could have caused deaths in Plame's counter-proliferation network (and he was worried about his own criminal liability); and b) to cover for Cheney, and misdirect Fitzgerald to Tim Russert and others, as the ones who told Libby Plame's identity, when the evidence clearly establishes that it was Cheney.

Fitzgerald's closing remarks are stunning. The Silent Man finally lays it all out--or as much of it as he needs to, to convict Libby of perjury and obstruction. He may have more; in fact, I'm pretty sure that he does, because he is a very economical and tight-lipped prosecutor. But what he has laid out in this trial, and pulls together particularly well in his closing remarks, would be way, way more than what is needed for immediate impeachment of Dick Cheney, if we weren't living in BushWorld, with a Congress that, even with the Democratic victories in the elections, is still not very representative of the American people*, and not all that into the rule of law, apparently. But perhaps this will give them true grit. Fitzgerald has certainly shown them what it looks like.


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*(The result of Diebold/ES&S "trade secret," proprietary vote counting--the people had to outvote the machines; the evil of money and war profiteering; and the fact that only 1/3 of the Senate was up for reelection in '06. There are still a lot of Bush "pod people" and other warmongers in Congress.)