Scooter Libby: Justice in disrepair
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
President Bush's commutation of a pal's prison sentence counts as a most shocking act of disrespect for the U.S. justice system. It's the latest sign of the huge repairs to American concepts of the rule of law that await the next president.
The president on Monday commuted the 2 1/2-year prison term awaiting Lewis "Scooter" Libby for lying to investigators about a 2003 leak of CIA official Valerie Plame's identity.
The commutation illustrates a profoundly dispiriting and unshakable aspect of the administration. The president and Vice President Dick Cheney see themselves and their cohorts as above traditional concepts of legal and constitutional constraints on their conduct in office.
In its single-minded focus on Iraq, the administration has put protecting the details of how the war was sold to the public ahead of everything. Libby was part of an administration campaign to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, for exposing problems with the administration's claims of Iraqi nuclear weapons activities.
The administration chose to make war on false or mistaken pretenses against a nation that posed no imminent threat to U.S. security. The president now has decided, whatever the political costs, to reward someone who defended the march to a war that was unjust, immoral and, by many standards, illegal.
Earlier this year, nearly 70 percent of poll respondents opposed a pardon for Libby. Many more Republican leaders will now worry about the course of the Bush presidency, as well all of us should. The country cannot succeed in the world by undermining justice and truth at home.
