Emptywheel Makes The Big Time
(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert — and yes, that's Marcy in the background)
Went through the metal detectors with Scooter, "the wife" and Ted Wells today. Wells told the guards that he was really tired, that this was his "second Friday with the jury." Fitz, OTOH, was rather ebullient yesterday. I imagine much of that could just be chalked up to differences in post-trial temperment, however, and not necessarily and indicator of what they think the jury is going to come back with. Could just be a case of postpartum depression.
Syd Schanberg has a good piece on the trial in the New York Observer:
Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald gets a conviction, he has established a trial record that will establish the administration’s guilt. Sprinkled throughout are the names of most of the neoconservatives who had been planning the current Iraq War ever since the 1991 Gulf War ended with Saddam Hussein still in power.They came out in the open in 1997 when they formed a Washington think tank of their own—the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Their first public act was a 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, calling for the swift “removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”Citing those still-undiscovered “weapons of mass destruction,” they said: “[W]e can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition … to uphold the [U.N.] sanctions …. ”Then, in 2000, just before Mr. Bush’s elevation to the White House by the Supreme Court, the PNAC war-seekers issued a lengthy manifesto calling for a major escalation of the country’s military mission. This 81-page document proposed a buildup that would make it possible for the United States to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.” The report depicted these wars as “large scale” and “spread across [the] globe.”Iraq was named as a major threat.
It's easy to get lost in the details of the story and forget what it's really about. Syd reminds us well:
Among the 25 signatories to the PNAC founding statement: Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalizad.Most of these names echo throughout the Libby trial record. Besides the damning notes from Mr. Cheney, accounts of conversations between Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby and Mr. Libby’s subsequent conversations with other pivotal administration officials, there is at least one document, in Mr. Cheney’s handwriting, that suggests the President had direct knowledge of the campaign to discredit Mr. Wilson.The trial and its record was always all about the unnecessary war—a war created by massive and deliberate lying about an imminent security threat that wasn’t there. That’s why the President and his men were desperate to shut Mr. Wilson up.He was the imminent threat—to their delusional empire-building.
Read the whole thing.
Also, while we're waiting, feel free to enjoy Mark Fiore's Slimy Circus by Scooter over at the SFGate. Misrememberin' is such an easy thing to do….
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