The prosecution's conclusion: US Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff zealously pursued information about a critic who said the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to make the case for war.
The view of the president and vice president: I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is a dedicated public servant who has worked tirelessly on behalf of his country.
Is Libby an influential White House adviser who lied? Or is he a man with a hectic schedule who happens to remember events differently from the reporters and administration figures who will eventually be called to testify against him?
"As lawyers, we recognize that a person's recollection and memory of events will not always match those of other people, particularly when they are asked to testify months after the events occurred," Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate, said in a statement.
The prosecutor, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald drew his detailed portrait of Libby based on a two-year investigation that pulled dozens of witnesses in for questioning, including US President George W. Bush and Cheney.
Libby, the indictment against him concludes, received information from Cheney, the State Department and the CIA about covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, whose husband was attacking an administration unable to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Libby then spread the information to reporters and later concocted a story that his information had come from reporters, the indictment says.
The other portrait of Libby, the favorable version, shows a deeply committed conservative who has been a player on the Washington scene since the early days of the Reagan administration.
Libby left the White House for the last time on Friday, departing after seeing some of the ideas he and others championed become administration policy.
In 1992, Libby and former Pentagon deputy Paul Wolfowitz wrote a paper favoring the use of pre-emptive force to prevent countries from developing weapons of mass destruction. The paper later won praise from the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, which called it "a blueprint for maintaining US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival."
Notwithstanding Fitzgerald's insistence on Friday that the criminal case is not about Iraq, he probably will seek to cast Libby as an architect of the US-led invasion, said Scott Fredericksen, a former prosecutor.
The prosecution will call Libby "a very bright guy at the highest levels of government with motivation to prevent Fitzgerald and the grand jury from learning the true source" of Libby's information about administration critic Joseph Wilson.
If he were representing Libby, lawyer David Schertler said he would present character witnesses to testify about Libby's dedication to public service.
"This guy, every day, deals with some of the most important issues facing the American people," said Schertler, a former federal prosecutor.
"You're asking him to recollect conversations, some fairly short, and he's giving his best recollections. Maybe he didn't remember correctly, but he didn't have the intent to deceive the special prosecutor or grand jury," he said.
Fitzgerald's probe initially sought to determine whether anyone in the administration violated the law by knowingly disclosing the identity of a covert CIA employee.
"You didn't have that, so why did you charge him?" Schertler suggested Libby's defense would assert.
Fitzgerald spent 22 months on the investigation at a cost of more than US$1 million. In the end, Libby was charged with five felonies alleging obstruction of justice, perjury to a grand jury and making false statements to FBI agents. If convicted, he could face a maximum of 30 years in prison and US$1.25 million in fines.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS