Woodward helped Libby: Lawyers would be perfectly happy to argue that water is dry

the ap dutifully reported the spin from libby's attorneys...

Attorneys for the aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, described Wednesday's statement by the Washington Post's assistant managing editor as helpful for their defense, although Libby is charged with lying to a grand jury and the
FBI, not with disclosing the CIA official's name.

juan cole, once again, keeps us grounded...

The defense lawyers for Libby immediately claimed that the new information helped their client. The trick about this sort of thing is that you have to understand that for attorneys, any proposition may be put forward as long as it has not been explicitly rejected by the relevant court. That is, lawyers would be perfectly happy to argue that water is dry, and has not been ruled wet by any court of law, and that moreover anyone who criticizes them for so alleging is guilty of libel and very possibly also of sodomy, until that allegation is ruled on in court.

[...]

It does not matter to those folks that their assertions are false; they are speaking instrumentally, for the accomplishment of some purpose, not to express the truth.

[...]

In fact, the rather bizarre world of political discourse in Washington, DC, in which all sorts of untrue and faintly ridiculous allegations are routinely made, grows directly out of the unreal discourse of trial lawyers. So politicians (mostly lawyers) alleged to us that Iraq was on the verge of having a nuclear bomb, while in fact Iraq was not even on the verge of having one of those old Mickey Mouse watches that glowed in the dark because they were painted with uranium particles.

Libby has been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice among other charges. He lied to the grand jury on more than one occasion. He said that a journalist told him that Plame Wilson worked for the CIA. This allegation was not true, and nothing Bernstein said on Wednesday changes its falsity. Fitzgerald did not charge Libby with speaking to Woodward, or with being the first to leak Plame Wilson's name, or anything else affected by Woodward's trivial revelation.

except you've now got the entire right wing noise machine trumpeting that fitzgerald's case has collapsed and the allegations against libby are false and politically motivated...

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