Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

The facts, folks - just the facts, as summarized by The New York Times:

    I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted March 6, 2007, of lying to F.B.I. agents and grand jurors investigating the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative amid a burning dispute over the war in Iraq.

    The jury rejected Mr. Libby’s claims of memory lapses as it convicted him of obstruction of justice, giving false statements to the F.B.I. and perjuring himself, charges embodied in four counts of the indictment.

    The panel acquitted him on a single count of making false statements.

    On July 2, 2007, President Bush commuted the prison sentence.

In 1998, while still Governor of Texas, the same born-again Christian had ignored pleas for mercy for Karla Faye Tucker, 38, that came from Pope John Paul and the European Parliament, among others.  The nominally Christian fundamentalist televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell - normally staunch supporters of killing some prisoners - also called for the Governor’s commutation of her sentence.  Additional appeals to the Governor came from Sister Helen Prejean and Bianca Jagger, who led a clemency rally in opposition to the death sentence.  Sister Helen’s book Dead Man Walking and the movie adapted from it chronicled her work with a death-row inmate in Louisiana. 

Tucker’s legalized killing did not go unnoticed abroad.  Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Italy’s President at the time, noted in a public speech that spectators outside Huntsville Prison in Texas had cheered the announcement of Tucker’s death by lethal injection.  “And we are on the threshold of two thousand years of Christ!” he exclaimed.  In England, Richard Harries of the Diocese of Oxford reported that a Gospel singer’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” got shouted down by cries of “Kill the bitch!” from the crowd gathered outside the prison.

On January 26 that year, the almost notoriously right-wing journalist William F. Buckley devoted his column in The National Review to the Tucker case, which included this:

“The Court said No to the lady’s final appeal against the death sentence.  The lady in question is youngish (38) and beautiful.  She is a born-again Christian.  In the course of her conversations with the prison chaplain, all of them conducted with bulletproof glass separating minister and postulant, a courtship developed, and lo! they have been married, though they have never shaken hands.  The prosecutors who got her sentenced have asked for clemency.  [Emphasis added.  - P.M.]  So also a pro-death-penalty former U.S. attorney.  So also the sister of one of the murder victims.  Pat Robertson, the Pope of the Christian Coalition, has publicly requested clemency, while reiterating his support for capital punishment….”

Before Tucker was killed by a lethal injection, pleas for clemency also came to Gov. Bush from Waly Bacre Ndiaye, the United Nations commissioner on summary and arbitrary executions, the World Council of Churches, and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, among other world figures.  Unusual pleas came from additional conservative American political figures including Newt Gingrich.

Only the possibility of a last-minute stay by the United States Supreme Court - which had an appeal pending - or intervention by Texas Governor George Bush stood between Tucker and the distinction of becoming the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War, in 1863.

Not often does the august New York Times display the angered outrage exuded by this morning’s editorial, pointedly entitled “Soft on Crime”: 

“When he was running for president, George W. Bush loved to contrast his law-abiding morality with that of President Clinton, who was charged with perjury and acquitted.  For Mr. Bush, the candidate, ‘politics, after a time of tarnished ideals, can be higher and better.’

“Not so for Mr. Bush, the president.  Judging from his decision yesterday to commute the 30-month sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr. — who was charged with perjury and convicted — untarnished ideals are less of a priority than protecting the secrets of his inner circle and mollifying the tiny slice of right-wing Americans left in his political base…. “

So what might have motivated Libby’s legally determined actionable offence?  As noted, he had lied to federal agents investigating the leak of the name of a covert C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson.  By a funny coincidence, Mrs. Wilson’s husband Joseph Wilson had received the assignment to investigate a central claim in Bush’s drive to war with Iraq — to wit, whether Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Africa.  Mr. Wilson concluded that Iraq had not done that; furthermore, he had the temerity to share those conclusions with the American public. In essence: the casus belli the Dubya gang claimed to justify launching a war against Iraq - which had had nothing whatever to do with 9/11 - existed exclusively in that gang’s wishful thinking. Even more concisely: they had started a bilaterally murderous war without justification, legal or otherwise.

To quote The New York Times:

“It seems clear from the record that Vice President Dick Cheney organized a campaign to discredit Mr. Wilson.  And Mr. Libby, who was Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, was willing to lie to protect his boss….”

Dubya’s cheering section immediately demanded a presidential pardon.   “Those same Republicans”, The New York Times points out, ”have been rebelling against Mr. Bush, most recently on immigration reform, while Democrats in Congress have pursued an investigation into whether Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney lied about Iraq’s weapons programs.”  Funny coincidence after funny coincidence…. 

In that newspaper’s official editorial opinion, none of the “immense pressure on the president to do something before Mr. Libby went to jail [justified] the baldly political act of commuting his sentence….”

The New York Times has also gone back down Memory Lane:

“As governor of Texas, he was infamous for joking about the impending execution of Karla Faye Tucker, a killer who became a born-again Christian on Death Row.  As president, he has repeatedly put himself and those on his team, especially Mr. Cheney, above the law….”

Karla Faye Tucker did not ask for a pardon, only commutation of her death sentence to life in prison.  Huntsville Prison’s warden testified that she was a model prisoner and that, after fourteen years on Death Row, she likely had been reformed.  Despite those pleas, the Governor signed her death warrant.  In 1999, during the 2000 Republican Presidential primary race, the conservative -  repeat: conservative - commentator Tucker Carlson interviewed Bush for Talk Magazine (for September 1999, page 106).  An excerpt from that interview:

” . . . In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, a number of protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Karla Faye Tucker.  ‘Did you meet with any of them?’ I ask.  Bush whips around and stares at me.  “No, I didn’t meet with any of them”, he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed.  ‘I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it.  I watched his interview with Tucker, though.  He asked her real difficult questions like, ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’” “What was her answer?” I wonder.  “‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’”  I must look shocked — ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel — because he immediately stops smirking.  Bush denied that he had intended to make light of the issue….”

That extraordinarily angry New York Times editorial this morning concludes:

“Presidents have the power to grant clemency and pardons.  But in this case, Mr. Bush did not sound like a leader making tough decisions about justice.  He sounded like a man worried about what a former loyalist might say when actually staring into a prison cell.”