[Ninong]

Originally Posted by wozza

what the hell just read some of the highlighted bits from that link.
what it all about is that his book or did that actually happen, and why he was in court? im confused and disturbed by it all.

Irve Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Jr. is a former Special Assistant to the President of the United States, Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States and Special Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs. He was recently convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements and perjury. That was related to an investigation by the Special Counsel into the leaking of the identity of a covert CIA agent whose husband, a former United States Ambassador, had written an op-ed piece in the New York Times critical of the Bush Administration's claims that Saddam Hussein had attempted to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger.

A number of high ranking officials in the Bush Administration told reporters that the claims of former Ambassador Wilson that the administration had tweaked and twisted intelligence to fit their plans for war in Iraq shouldn't be given credence because his trip to Niger was just a "junket" set up by his wife who was a covert CIA agent working on weapons of mass destruction. In truth, Amb. Wilson was sent to Niger by Mrs. Wilson's superiors in the CIA. She prepared a memo for them, at their request, outlining his qualifications for the assignment.

After the Vice President asked the CIA to investigate reports that Saddam might be trying to acquire uranium from Niger, the CIA sent Amb. Wilson to investigate these claims and he concluded that they were baseless. The original report came from British "Intelligence." The Brits were wrong. The French thought the Brits were nuts, but that's a separate issue. The two mines in question are under the control of the French and one of them has been flooded for years. The phony letter that the British relied upon for their "intelligence" report was a forgery produced at the behest of Italian intelligence agents. When the UN's IAEA finally got a copy of the letter, they couldn't stop laughing. It was on the wrong letterhead and it was signed by a Nigerois official who had left office 12 years earlier. There were numerous misspellings in the French text of the letter. But I digress...

The review in the New Yorker is of a novel, The Apprentice, written by Mr. Libby over a twenty year period and published in 1996, long before his tour of duty as the Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney. Prior to joining Cheney's staff, Libby was a very high paid attorney in Washington, D.C., and, as this novel proves, he also had a very active imagination!

[Ninong]

On Hardball with Chris Matthews this evening, Andrea Mitchell (aka Mrs. Alan Greenspan) said that polls show the public supports a pardon for Scooter Libby: "They're going to really tamp this down and appeal to the polling which indicates that most people think, in fact, that he should be pardoned, Scooter Libby should be pardoned."

Here's the latest poll on that question that I could find. From CNN:

Poll: 69 percent oppose pardon for Libby in CIA leak case

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Nearly 70 percent of Americans oppose a presidential pardon for former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby after his conviction on perjury and other charges related to a CIA agent's exposure, according to a CNN poll out Monday.

Just 18 percent said they would support a pardon for Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, while 69 percent said they opposed the idea. Meanwhile, a narrow majority said they believe Cheney was part of a cover-up in the case.

The new poll was conducted for CNN by Opinion Research Corp. between Friday and Sunday. Pollsters quizzed 1,027 adults for the survey, which had a sampling error of 3 percentage points.

P.S. -- As her husband would no doubt say, Mrs. Greenspan is suffering from a bad case of irrational exuberance in her defense of the Bush Administration.