John Fund/ Wall Street Journal
March 12, 2007
Mr. Fund- please drop the naïve act- it does not suit you as it does Kate O’Beirne. Of course, Scooter Libby needs to be pardoned- he only lied to cover up a civil wrong, to protect his boss. He does not deserve to rot in prison for even one day. End of story regarding Mr. Libby. Beginning of story involving Mr. Cheney and perhaps Mr. Bush in what you call “infighting” between the CIA and the current administration.
Your vacuous complaint that the CIA never should have forced the attorney general to investigate the Valerie Plame “outing” is a clear trick play and I’m not sure why you’ve played it. You must want us to think this is a silly complaint and it is. The problem is that the CIA has been systematically blamed for everything from the Kennedy assassination to the 9-11 Attack and the false information regarding WMDs in Iraq. When Rumsfeld could not get the CIA to lie for him, he had to appoint army intelligence agencies to manufacture false information about Iraq.
All the while, even after the 9-11 Report clearly showed that the “higher ups” in the FBI refused to follow up on CIA information regarding an impending attack, and despite the falsifying of accurate data on Iraq, the current administration and its blindfolded Congressional lackeys showed no desire for the truth, as usual, and attempted not one investigation. The CIA, attempting to avoid “blowing the lid” off of the whole administration, insisted on investigating the outing of one of their covert employees for low-life political reasons. Why are we not currently investigating “the role of the CIA and FBI in 9-11?”, or “the role of the CIA in intelligence in Iraq?” These are very important nonpartisan issues, ignored by this administration and its Congress. Neither of them seems to care, at all, about the country- only politics as usual.
This was no mere political “infighting” between the country’s intelligence community and the Cheney/ Bush administration. This was our intelligence agency subverted by your Vice President, sir! I disagree with Law Professor Turley. Tricking people into lying about civil wrongs to create a federal crime is a bad precedent. If Congress would censure wrongdoers and blatantly publicize the facts instead of hiding them, it would serve us all far better than trumped up prosecutions.
Our CIA, maligned and subverted by your Vice President, tried as subtly and judiciously as possible, to bring about an investigation, the only investigation by your party, Mr. Fund, of the perversion of covert intelligence information by your administration. Get it? In our country, perversion of intelligence information is a serious crime- even a capital one. The news media’s job in our country is to expose these crimes by government officials, especially if they lead to mass bloodshed. Covering up these things in your fascist dictatorship, unfortunately, is only a civil wrong. So I’ll pardon you. However, it would be nice if you would vacation in some other country for a while and inadvertently foster fascism and secrecy elsewhere.
Allen Finkelstein, D.O.