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by Greg Pierce, Inside Politics
“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,” Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger writes.
“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,” Mr. Henninger said.
“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.’
“The Libby case went to the jury [Wednesday]. After the verdict, all the characters in this satire on Beltway mores will go back to doing what they did before, except for one — Scooter Libby.”
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