Apr 14 2006
Fitzgerald Is Withholding Exculpatory Documents
If you go back and read the last Fitzgerald filing after reading the recent filing by Team Libby you see some interesting dynamics which maybe were not so obvious. In the recent Team Lubby filing the claim is made their are many documents regarding the OVP and White House plans to address Joe Wilson’s now-known-to-be lies. The point is that these documents are exculpatory to the underlying basis of the indictment which assumes Libby had reason to commit perjury. And that reason was he was part of an effort to bring retribution on the Wilsons. Fitzgerald knows that is the basis of his case. Yet he tries to hide this exculpatory evidence, which he admits exists! From Fitz-Magoos latest filing, from the middle of Page 7:
Some documents produced to defendant could be characterized as reflecting a plan to discredit, punish, or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson. The government declined to produce documents relating solely to other subjects of the investigation, even if such documents could be so characterized as reflecting a possible attempt or plan to discredit or punish Mr. Wilson or Ms. Wilson.
Well, Fitzgerald seems to know he has information which demonstrates the plans to respond to Wilson. They just don’t fit his view of events so he is trying to hide them from the defense and the court. What a baffoon. More later if time permits.
Yes, and he also doesn’t want to furnish any of said documents to the defense, which is in clear violation of procedure. Apparently, we’re supposed to take his (and MSM’s) word for all of this.
Isn’t it great to live in a nation of laws?
Wowie Zahawie
Sorry everyone, but Iraq did go uranium shopping in Niger.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, April 10, 2006, at 4:43 PM ET
In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency—Iraq’s senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect—was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie. After the Kuwait war in 1991, when Rolf Ekeus arrived in Baghdad to begin the inspection and disarmament work of UNSCOM, he was greeted by Zahawie, who told him in a bitter manner that “now that you have come to take away our assets,” the two men could no longer be friends. (They had known each other in earlier incarnations at the United Nations in New York.)
At a later 1995 U.N. special session on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Zahawie was the Iraqi delegate and spoke heatedly about the urgent need to counterbalance Israel’s nuclear capacity. At the time, most democratic countries did not have full diplomatic relations with Saddam’s regime, and there were few fully accredited Iraqi ambassadors overseas, Iraq’s interests often being represented by the genocidal Islamist government of Sudan (incidentally, yet another example of collusion between “secular” Baathists and the fundamentalists who were sheltering Osama Bin Laden). There was one exception—an Iraqi “window” into the world of open diplomacy—namely the mutual recognition between the Baathist regime and the Vatican. To this very important and sensitive post in Rome, Zahawie was appointed in 1997, holding the job of Saddam’s ambassador to the Holy See until 2000. Those who knew him at that time remember a man much given to anti-Jewish tirades, with a standing ticket for Wagner performances at Bayreuth. (Actually, as a fan of Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung in particular, I find I can live with this. Hitler secretly preferred sickly kitsch like Franz Lehar.)
In February 1999, Zahawie left his Vatican office for a few days and paid an official visit to Niger, a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore. It was from Niger that Iraq had originally acquired uranium in 1981, as confirmed in the Duelfer Report. In order to take the Joseph Wilson view of this Baathist ambassadorial initiative, you have to be able to believe that Saddam Hussein’s long-term main man on nuclear issues was in Niger to talk about something other than the obvious. Italian intelligence (which first noticed the Zahawie trip from Rome) found it difficult to take this view and alerted French intelligence (which has better contacts in West Africa and a stronger interest in nuclear questions). In due time, the French tipped off the British, who in their cousinly way conveyed the suggestive information to Washington. As everyone now knows, the disclosure appeared in watered-down and secondhand form in the president’s State of the Union address in January 2003.
Read the rest on slate.com
SBD
Sorry for returning to some old news, but I was thinking about this case this morning and marvelling at Fitz’s chutzpah. I mean, he and his buddy Comey file sworn affidavits to the effect that, regardless of the absolute wording of the delegation of authority to Fitz, they each had separate, private, unspoken mental reservations about the scope of Fitz’s authority and that those mental reservations fundamentally limited Fitz’s authority in ways that no one reading the written authorization would have imagined. Not only that, but Fitz’s own later representations of his authority are in stark opposition to the representations that he swore to in the affidavit! Oh, and by the way, Fitz wants to put Libby away for perjury!! It’s amazing to me that he has the nerve to submit that twaddle–tissue of lies–to a judge and then appear before that judge ever again. I can’t imagine what the judge must think of that, but my experience has been that judges generally resent being lied to.