Scootin' right along

Today's proceedings featured a replay of Scooter's two Grand Jury testimonies from back in early 2004 with no Perry Mason moments to be found. You can read the unofficial transcript at FDL, as usual. More excellent analysis here, as usual.

After reading the transcripts I'm really no more enlightened than yesterday. His defense continues to be that he didn't leak classified info and was otherwise just confused due to the crush of important work during his 12 hour day, but I'm not sure the jury will buy it. Fitzgerald's opening statement about him "learning something Thursday he knew on Monday" (or thereabouts) is still safely in play. Perhaps the defense phase will clear that up.

He testified that Cheney broke the wife story in early June followed by days of discussion, yet he wants everyone to believe that when the Wilson op-ed appeared in early July his memory wasn't jogged? I sometimes suffer from CRS and can understand the "note driven memory" thing, but this appears a Gumbyesqe stretch.

Barring bombshells here are a few possibilities: 1) truth is stranger than fiction, or 2) he has no other choice but to lie and stall to keep himself out of jail until a pardon can come down. Look what they did to that border guard in jail!

There's a third option, which is they want to use the trial to quietly leak certain information to the public before moving to future objectives, but since I'm kinda tinfoiled out at the moment my heart isn't fully into this one yet. Still, it demands an explanation, so here we go. First, from FDL:

In his March 5th, 2004 testimony to the Grand Jury, Mr. Libby made an interesting slip of the tongue. He was talking about Iraq's attempts to acquire fissile materials as represented in the NIE, but instead of saying "Iraq", he said "Iran". Now, with any other talking head under any other circumstances, this could be a common enough mistake. However, given the Bush administration's hard-on for attacking Iran over their nuclear program, one has to wonder if this was actually a Freudian slip.

Possible. Bush once made such a Freudian slip between Saddam and bin Laden. But there's liberal hypocrisy to deal before moving on. Their overall aversion to battle-creep is understandable, but we're talking about Iran, not Azerbaijan. How many times have you heard port siders argue for more troops in Afghanistan "who attacked us", and less in Iraq "who didn't and wasn't a threat", yet they seem adamantly against engaging Iran, a country we KNOW has attacked us several times without reciprocity. Puzzling, in a non puzzling sort of way.

As mentioned previously on this site, Stratfor's post-analysis on the Iraq war was that it was less about removing Saddam and his WMDs than it was boxing in and containing Iran and making a general statement about taking on America. Hold that thought and consider this gushing comment about Judy Miller spoken by Scooter in the GJ:

L: This was our first meeting, or she may have come to my office once before. She's a very responsible reporter, and I'd wanted to meet her because she cares about the WMD issue and threats to America.

Gee whillikers. If you'll recall, he had previous dealings with her as a source of her book "Germs" back in 2001 and made similar comments about her reportorial skills regards weapons in the Aspen letter. Sure, it's a good guess those who refer to the president as McChimpsterburton will believe Miller was a useful idiot to further the PNAC, however others might believe they used her because she was one of the few non-leftist ideologues available.

If Bush misdirected the public on Iraq to get position on Iran or for other strategic goals does that rise to the level of impeachment? Is maintaining operational security possible in modern warfare under our current political climate? Was Scooter part of that?