Federal Court OKs Treason, Crimes Against Humanity

The traitors and war criminals who have taken over our government are dancing with joy this evening, and rightly so. Earlier today, a Federal Court of Appeals in Washington granted them legal immunity for every criminal action they have taken while in office.

The ruling, made by a panel of three judges in dismissing an appeal in the case of Valerie Plame [photo], absolves government officials of individual accountability for any actions taken in an official capacity, regardless of whether those actions violated federal law or jeopardized national security. In effect, it legalizes treason, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Ho hum. Andy Sullivan reported it this way for Reuters:

Appeals court upholds CIA leak lawsuit dismissal

A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday dismissed former CIA analyst Valerie Plame's lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney and several former Bush administration officials for disclosing her identity to the public.

The Court of Appeals in Washington dealt another setback to the former spy, who has said her career was destroyed when officials blew her cover in 2003 to retaliate against her husband, Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson.

It's not only -- or even primarily -- a setback to the "former spy", as Andy Sullivan puts it. It's a setback to the Rule of Law, and a victory for the forces of tyranny. Perhaps Andy Sullivan can't say this, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Plame's outing led [to] a lengthy criminal investigation, which resulted in the conviction of Cheney's top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for perjury and obstruction of justice.

President George W. Bush commuted Libby's 2 1/2-year prison sentence last year.

Plame and Wilson sought money damages from Cheney, Libby, former White House aide Karl Rove and former State Department official Richard Armitage for violating their constitutional free speech, due process and privacy rights.

But the court ruled that the named officials are not liable for their actions, as Sullivan continues:

[A] three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld a federal judge's ruling that dismissed the couple's lawsuit.

The court ruled Cheney and the others were acting within their official capacity when they revealed Plame's identity to reporters.

Government employees who engage in questionable acts, such as abusing prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay facility or engaging in defamatory speech, cannot be held individually liable if they are carrying out official duties, the court said.

"The conduct, then, was in the defendants' scope of employment regardless of whether it was unlawful or contrary to the national security of the United States," Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote in the opinion.

It is interesting -- and horrifying! -- to note that this decision ventures well beyond the "just following orders" defense which was used by the Nazi war criminals and found wanting at Nuremberg.

It even goes beyond the "divine right of government officials" long desired by the Dominionists of the allegedly "Christian" so-called "Right". At least under the proposed "Constitution Restoration Act", government officials would have to claim they believed they were carrying out the will of God in order to be absolved of their crimes.

And -- let's be clear -- there is no question about whether crimes have been committed in this case. The Vice President's right-hand-man, Lewis "Scooter" Libby [photo], has already been convicted, and although his sentence was commuted, that doesn't make him any less guilty.

The crime in this case involved much more than outing Valerie Plame, an undercover national security professional, ruining her career and jeopardizing the lives of everyone who had ever worked with her. It was done at least in part to discredit her husband, Joe Wilson, who had publicly challenged one of the administration's most useful lies.

The lie was useful because it propelled the country along the road to war against Iraq -- a war waged on false pretenses that has already cost our country trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, not to mention all the other damages that are not so easily counted.

The falsely "justified" war has cost Iraq even more, of course; we've wrecked the infrastructure of a country that used to be home to 28 million people, and along the way we've killed more than a million of them and turned millions more into refugees.

It's a war of aggression, the ultimate crime against humanity, and it was all based on lies, including the tale about how Saddam Hussein had allegedly sought to obtain uranium from Niger -- a claim Joe Wilson investigated personally and found to be utterly baseless.

Proponents of truth and justice regard Joe Wilson's actions in this case as heroic: after all, he was taking a great personal risk in trying to defuse a dangerous situation by bringing to light a mistaken claim which was repeated endlessly by the administration.

But the claim wasn't exactly "mistaken". It was a deliberate, carefully crafted lie. And rather than allowing the truth of the matter to stand, the highest officials in our government chose to attack the truth-teller indirectly -- through his wife!

Exposing the identity of an undercover national security officer is -- according to federal law -- an act of treason. Telling deliberate lies in order to facilitate a war of aggression is -- according to international law -- a crime against humanity. These are the most serious crimes anyone can commit on the national and international stage respectively. All of this goes overlooked in the coverage provided by Reuters and others, who are -- as usual -- focusing on the narrow.

But even in the short and narrow version of this story, the course of action taken by our government officials has been despicable. To get back at a man who told the truth and tried to save many innocent lives, they attacked his wife! They couldn't confront Joe Wilson directly, of course, because he was telling the truth and they knew it.

So instead they outed his wife and damaged his family, and at the same time they also destroyed a precious national security asset -- an undercover professional, an expert on controlling the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration, under the tutelage of political operative Karl Rove [photo], perfected the tactic of using the specter of terrorists with nuclear weapons as a cattle prod. And in light of this, the outing of Valerie Plame alone reveals hypocrisy of the highest order.

But it's only one of many examples of rank hypocrisy in this case, and those examples are but drops in an ocean of hypocrisy, treason, and crimes against humanity that can be found (can't be missed!) in the horrific annals of this extraordinarily destructive administration. But Andy Sullivan and Reuters aren't saying anything about any of them. They're busy casting the decision as a "setback" to a "former spy".

Plame's lawyer says she will probably appeal. But surely the entire weight of the bipartisan criminal policy establishment will be aligned against any potential reversal of this decision.

And in the meantime, what about the rest of us? Because we weren't personally affected, because our careers weren't destroyed, we have no "legal standing" in this case, despite the fact that the ruling -- if upheld -- unleashes a most virulent form of tyranny, and despite the obvious fact that this is the ruling's primary intention.

You probably won't hear anyone criticizing this decision in the mainstream media -- and you might not read much about it elsewhere on the internet -- who knows? John Edwards had an affair, did you hear? Paris Hilton made a video!

So let's recap, shall we? A Federal court has ruled that some of the highest officials in our government are not accountable for their acts of treason, mass murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity -- not because they were following orders (for surely some of them, especially Karl Rove and Dick Cheney [photo], were giving the orders); not because they thought they were doing something righteous or Blessed by God; but simply because they held positions in the United States government -- regardless of the fact that these actions violated the most serious federal and international laws, regardless of the fact that they all knew their actions were deeply illegal, and regardless of the fact that they were never legitimately elected to those government positions in the first place -- or legitimately re-elected in the second place.

Furthermore, the court decrees, this immunity applies not only to the principals in this case but to all manner of American government officials committing all manner of horrific crimes -- including torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Did you get that? Do you finally get it now?

The terrorists have won. The federal courts are now ruling that they are all beyond the law.

No doubt the perpetrators of 9/11 will be afforded the same immunity [* UPDATE: This prediction came true two days later]. Ho hum.

Just another "setback" for a "former spy".

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Moyers Rips The Neocons Who Are Begging For Libby's Pardon

Bill Moyers is a journalist who calls 'em like he sees 'em, and there's nothing wrong with his eyesight. In an essay posted this evening at Bob Parry's Consortium News, Moyers looks at the neocons who are clamoring for the president to pardon the convicted perjurer, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby:

Begging for Libby's Pardon

We have yet another remarkable revelation of the mindset of Washington's ruling clique of neoconservative elites -- the people who took us to war from the safety of their Beltway bunkers.

Even as Iraq grows bloodier by the day, their passion of the week is to keep one of their own from going to jail.

It is well known that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- once Vice President Cheney's most trusted adviser -- has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury. Lying. Not a white lie, mind you. A killer lie. Scooter Libby deliberately poured poison into the drinking water of democracy by lying to federal investigators, for the purpose of obstructing justice.

Attempting to trash critics of the war, Libby and his pals in high places -- including his boss Dick Cheney -- outed a covert CIA agent. Libby then lied to cover their tracks. To throw investigators off the trail, he kicked sand in the eyes of truth.

"Libby lied about nearly everything that mattered," wrote the chief prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. The jury agreed and found him guilty on four felony counts. Judge Reggie B. Walton -- a no-nonsense, lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key type, appointed to the bench by none other than George W. Bush -- called the evidence "overwhelming" and threw the book at Libby.

You would have thought their man had been ordered to Guantanamo, so intense was the reaction from his cheerleaders. They flooded the judge's chambers with letters of support for their comrade and took to the airwaves in a campaign to "free Scooter."

Vice President Cheney issued a statement praising Libby as "a man...of personal integrity" -- without even a hint of irony about their collusion to browbeat the CIA into mangling intelligence about Iraq in order to justify the invasion.

"A patriot, a dedicated public servant, a strong family man, and a tireless, honorable, selfless human being," said Donald Rumsfeld -- the very same Rumsfeld who had claimed to know the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction and who boasted of "bulletproof" evidence linking Saddam to 9/11.

There's more, and it's good. I'd read it if I were you.

I'd also pay attention to the brilliant remark from Judge Walton which was preserved in this post from Liquified Viscera. (No hints on this one; you have to read it for yourself!)

Time To Help Sibel Edmonds -- Please Call Waxman's Office!

Here's Luke Ryland, from his latest post at Wot Is It Good 4:

Henry Waxman's House Government Oversight Committee has been doing great work lately with various hearings and investigations, and some have argued that we shouldn't pressure Waxman on Sibel's case given that he undoubtedly has a full schedule. I have a two-fold response:

a) We are simply asking that Waxman announce that he will have hearings, we can argue about the timing later.

b) All of the background work on this case has been completed. Sibel's claims have already been investigated, and confirmed, by a number of other bodies - Congress, FBI, Department of Justice.

Of course, given the nature of Sibel's work as a translator, all of her claims are easily verified by the source material that she translated. As she says in Kill The Messenger:

"Put out those tapes. Put out those wiretaps. Put out those documents. Put out the truth. The truth is going to hurt them. The truth is going to set me free."

It was Whistleblower Week in DC last week - and Sibel's case highlights a number of important issues regarding whistleblowers. Not only do we have the dereliction of Congress and the media, but also the chilling effect on other whistleblowers, and more importantly, whistleblowing.

As Sibel says in a new interview:

"What kind of example is my case presenting to those other people who may want to do the right thing and come forward? They would say it doesn’t make a difference at the end, because I pursued every channel possible. I went as high as I could go with the courts, including the Supreme Court, and as you know, they issued a gag order on me several times and invoked the State Secrets Privilege... I’m prevented from discussing whether or not I’m right. And I went all the way to Congress, I did the right thing. I was not what they call a “leaker” who goes straight to the media and starts divulging classified documents. I went to the appropriate committees, the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee, too, by the way, and the House and Senate... I went through the other legitimate channels — the courts, the Inspector General’s Office, which is the executive branch. I tried the media. So I don’t blame those people that get pessimistic and say it doesn’t make a difference, or think they’ll lose their job or possibly go to jail. "

Think about that. Even if you don't know anything about Sibel's case (there's a primer here), I urge you to call Waxman's office and demand public hearings into her case because if Sibel can't get hearings into her case, why would anyone with incriminating evidence step forward to assist Waxman, or anyone else, with any of his other hearings?

As Sibel said in the same interview:

"They make an example out of you. Because if one case, let’s say my case, would really bring justice and accountability, you would see so many people doing the same thing. And how many times — let’s just look at the past decade — have you seen a legitimate whistleblower from any of these agencies come forward and prevail? I don’t think you can name one case."

Again, if you have hope in Waxman and in the investigations that he will hold (as many of us do), I urge you to call his office and demand public hearings into Sibel Edmonds' case - if only because it will help facilitate investigations into the things that you most care about.

For whistleblowers, there are 'knowns' and 'unknowns' - the 'knowns' include the fact that you will be retaliated against, lose your job, and probably your career, and often your family and your home. The 'unknowns' include whether there will be any upside, any accountability, any justice, to mitigate against the known, guaranteed, downside.

How can we ask potential whistleblowers to stand up and be 'patriotic' and disclose wrong-doing if people like Sibel Edmonds, with documented proof of corruption, espionage, and treason by high-level US officials, validated by multiple investigations by Congress, FBI & DoJ, can't get any resolution or accountability?

Here's Sibel, again from the same interview:

"So you have this case which for the past five years has been confirmed by Congressional sources, and people familiar with my case, and the Department of Justice’s Inspector General’s Office, and has never been contradicted or denied by the Justice Department or the FBI, and still nothing has been done.

There has been no hearing and nobody has been held accountable. We are basically where we started and I find that really appalling."

Seriously, if we don't stand up for Sibel, and demand public hearings and accountability into her case, then we can't reasonably expect anyone with incriminating evidence to come forward regarding Waxman's other investigations - the Global Warming propaganda, the Niger caper, the Plame Wilson caper, war profiteering etc.

Please call the offices of Congressmen Waxman - (202) 225-3976 demanding open hearings into Sibel Edmonds' case. (Capitol switchboard number - 800-828-0498)

We'll have more from Luke and Sibel later in the week, but for now: Please make Waxman's phone ring ... and ring and ring and ring!

Imploding In Slow Motion: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rove, Bush -- And A Tumbling House Of Cards

It hasn't been a very good day for blood-soaked warmongers.

Paul Wolfowitz is leaving his post as President of the World Bank -- but he's getting a $400,000 severance package.

Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are claiming immunity from prosecution over the Plame-Wilson leak, saying that whatever they said amongst themselves and to reporters was part of a "policy dispute".

And George Bush has refused to answer questions about whether he sent his Chief of Staff and his future Attorney General to the bedside of former Attorney General John Ashcroft when Ashcroft was hospitalized, in order to try to persuade him to authorize the warrantless wiretapping program which Ashcroft had previously declared illegal.

So ... it finally looks as though the blood-soaked warmongers are imploding.

It's not free-fall speed ... but I'll take it.

And kudos to my Australian friend Gandhi, without whom I could never keep up with this stuff!

REVEALED: Rove Deleted His Email Accidentally!

Finally! Here's a story that will put to rest all the idle speculation about one of the ugliest pseudo-scandals in recent American history. Now, finally, all has been revealed:

Karl Rove didn't mean to delete all the email which the White House says it can't find. He was just doing the usual housekeeping that people do when they organize their email, and he had no idea that messages were being deleted from the server as well as from his inbox.

Karl Rove's lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush's chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican-sponsored server, saying Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law.
...
"His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived," Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said.

And everybody knows attorneys never lie, and Rove never lies, so it's simply inconceivable that Rove's attorney could be less than truthful about this.

So.

There's no need to lose any further sleep over the "loss" of thousands of potentially incriminating documents, because they weren't deliberately shredded, they were just accidentally deleted. And there was nothing to hide anyway.

That's why the White House can confidently state that

the administration is making an honest effort to recover any lost e-mails.

You see? It's all quite simple and above-board.

So just move along, there's no story here.

Nobody lied, nobody died, nobody cried.

It's just a political witch-hunt. That's all.

And it's pointless, because everybody knows there are no witches in the White House.

Just a bunch of slimy bottom-feeders who will say anything to stay in power for another day, and whose lies are getting more transparent all the time.

The prosecutor probing the Valerie Plame spy case saw and copied all of Rove's e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove's laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee, Luskin said.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, subpoenaed the e-mails from the White House, the RNC and Bush's re-election campaign, he added.

"There's never been any suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record," Luskin said.

Yeah, sure! That's a good one. How would a prosecutor know if there was anything missing? Unless Rove kept a list of the email messages he had deleted, there would be no way to know what was missing ... and because Fitzgerald never complained that anything was missing, that proves what, exactly?

Oh, it just doesn't say. How unfortunate. But whatever...

The mystery of the missing e-mails is just one part of a furor over the firings of eight federal prosecutors that has threatened Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' job and thrown his Justice Department into turmoil.

For now, Bush is standing by his longtime friend from Texas, who has spent weeks huddled in his fifth-floor conference room at the Justice Department preparing to tell his story to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

New documents released Friday by the Justice Department may shed additional light, but their release prompted Gonzales' one-time chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, to postpone a closed-door interview with congressional investigators.

Again, more evidence that this is nothing but a pseudo-tempest in a pseudo-teapot.

If Alberto Gonzales had done anything wrong, do you think it would take him weeks to prepare for a little bit of testimony?

And if Kyle Sampson had anything to hide, would he be postponing interviews with investigators?

Of course not. Move along. Lah-de-dah. Pfft.

Dear Scooter Libby: Go Directly To Jail! Do Not Pass GO! Do Not Collect $200!

As TIME Magazine reports:

Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was convicted Tuesday of obstruction, perjury and lying to the FBI in an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity.

Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was accused of lying and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters.

He was acquitted of one count of lying to the FBI.

Sentencing in the case has been set for June 5, officials said.
...
On the five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI, Libby faces up to 30 years in prison, although it is expected to be far less because of federal sentencing guidelines.

Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is the only person charged in the case, which grew out of an investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity.

Plame is married to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who emerged in mid-2003 as an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's case for the Iraq war.

Fitzgerald says Libby learned about Plame from Cheney and other officials in June 2003 and relayed it to reporters. Libby's defense team argued that Libby recalled his conversations to the best of his ability. Any inaccuracies he made to the FBI or a federal grand jury were the result of a faulty memory, attorneys said.

A Poor Choice Of Words

It's hard to believe that it was less than two weeks ago. On February 3rd, I posted a piece called "Sneaky Internet Bloggers, Cheap Media Whores". That was about a "reporter" who called himself "Jeff Gannon", and who maybe wasn't a reporter at all. "Gannon" had attracted attention by asking unusually soft questions at White House gaggles and press conferences. In that post, among other things, I wrote:

I wonder what they pay him. I wonder whether he earns enough to pay for his own lipstick.

Go ahead, Jeff. Tell us. What's your price?

Two weeks in politics is a very long time. Recent events have shown that there was a lot more involved in this story than I imagined at the time. Now we know that the man who called himself "Jeff Gannon" was using a false name. And he wasn't simply a faux-reporter lobbing softball questions. He was actually a man with another profession. The "oldest" profession, if you get my drift. And that's not all. Nobody could have guessed how much bigger and uglier the story would become, and we still don't know all there is to know!

If you haven't been following the "Jeff Gannon" story, here's a good place to start, and here's a good place to continue. There are some very interesting links on these pages, and in the stories they link to. Especially the second one. As the expression goes, "Viewer discretion is advised".

Suffice it to say that my use of the word "whore" in that title was more appropriate than I could have imagined. But I cannot claim as much credit for my use of the word "cheap". If you follow those links, you'll find out that the man who called himself "Jeff Gannon" billed his clients at the rate of $200 an hour, or $1200 per weekend. That's not what you would call "inexpensive".

But on the other hand, "cheap" doesn't always mean "inexpensive". According to dictionary.com, it can also mean "Worthy of no respect; vulgar or contemptible". And even though I say so myself, the lowly and nearly frozen Winter Patriot hit that nail right on the head. "Vulgar" and "Contemptible" seem like compliments compared to what some other people are saying about the so-called reporter known as "Jeff Gannon". You can surely find any number of bloggers who are ripping him to shreds, even as we speak.

But I'm not headed in that direction. Not tonight, anyway. I simply want to make one small observation, somewhat off to the side of the gay-sex-for-hire angle. It seems that the media whore who called himself "Jeff Gannon" asked a question during an interview which showed that he had access to classified CIA information pertaining to covert agent Valerie Plame, whose cover was blown, seemingly deliberately, by someone deep within the corridors of power.

Did "Jeff Gannon" play a role in 'outing' a covert agent? It seems as if he may have. And if so, we're not talking about prostitution any more, folks. We're talking about treason. There's a lot more that went on behind closed doors, and some of it may never come out. But given what we know now, and the probability that more details are still to come, it looks to me as if the "Jeff Gannon Affair" is going to wind up being very expensive indeed. But for whom?

Governments have fallen over less. Much less, in fact. But we're talking about a government which cannot afford to fall. So what else can happen?

Stay tuned, but be very careful...