Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, stands indicted for lying to a grand jury and obstructing investigators probing the outing of an undercover CIA operative. These are serious charges brought by a serious prosecutor. They are not, as some would have it, "technicalities." You can't have justice unless people cooperate with criminal investigations and tell the truth when they have sworn an oath to do so.
Certainly if Libby lied to the grand jury he should be appropriately punished. The Star Tribune's endorsement of the idea that one should be punished for perjury comes rather late, as they were rather cool to the idea when the liar was President Clinton. Then, it was "only about sex" and thus unimportant.
The rest of the editorial is an attempt to cast a policy disagreement as a crime. The usual allegation of taking the country to war in Iraq on shaky intelligence is made, without mentioning that most of the world's intellegence services agreed that Hussein's Iraq was working on or had possession of WMDs. It also ignores the other arguments made in favor or removing Hussein, implying the only reason for the invasion was WMDs.
The editorial accuses the administration of "smearing" Joseph Wilson while ignoring the fact that what the administration said about Wilson was in the main correct , and omitting the fact that Wilson's version of events as reported in the New York Times was not what Wilson reported to the CIA (as noted by the Senate's investigation of the intelligence failures in Iraq).
To the Strib's partisan clowns - where's the thousand crimes?
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