Thursday, February 22, 2007

The Red Queen Trial of Scooter Libby

Daniel Henninger has an excellent column on the Scooter Libby trial.

The trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is the closest version of a Red Queen trial this country has had in a long time. One says that knowing it might start a stampede from past defendants laying claim to the most upside-down prosecution.

Lewis G. Carroll's account of the Knave' s trial before the Red Queen and White Rabbit is famous for the Queen's dictum, "Sentence first, verdict afterward." But read the full transcript of the mock trial and one will see that the real subject is not justice, but the humiliation of the defendant.

The trial of Scooter Libby in Washington, the national capital of illogic, has been exemplary. In December 2003, the prosecutor purports a crime has been committed by revealing a "covert" CIA agent's identity to the press--despite knowing then what the outside world learned nearly three years later--that the revealer of the agent was a State Department official, Richard Armitage. With the "whodunnit" solved on day one, the prosecution follows the Red Queen's script by taking the nation on a useless, joyless ride through the opaque looking-glass of Washington journalism.

The testimony of three of the world's most sophisticated journalists--Judith Miller, Matthew Cooper and Tim Russert--was the trial's closest thing to the White Rabbit reading nonsense verse to the jury: "For this must ever be a secret, kept from all the rest, between yourself and me."

Yes, indeed. Libby is guilty of one thing only: he worked for this administration. That is enough in the moonbatosphere to convict him, even though there was no crime committed.

As Henninger points out, this is what our justice system has been reduced to: we no longer prosecute crimes, we pile innuendo upon innuendo, light the kindling, then torch the reputations of those in the middle. It's a most disgusting way for a legal system to behave.