The Guardian --- I. Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is being tried on five counts related to the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name in 2003....
WRIC-TV -- Lewis Libby -- who used to be Vice President Cheney's chief of staff -- is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.Cheney is expected to testify in Libby's behalf. But he won't be the only unusual witness. A number of reporters are likely to be called, since the trial's subject is Libby's conversations with them about C-I-A officer Valerie Plame.Prosecutors accuse Libby of lying to hide his role in news stories that blew Plame's cover. Her husband, ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a prominent Iraq war critic, and the couple maintains the leak was White House payback......
ABC News ---
.....Libby has been called a master of discretion, and the trial promises to be a high-profile bloodletting. It will pit senior White House officials against senior vice presidential staffers as well as vice presidential aides against prominent journalists.
Among those on the star-studded witness list are former White House press secretary Ari Fleisher and NBC "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert.
Perhaps potentially more damaging for the White House is that the trial shines a spotlight on some of the questionable tactics used to justify the war in Iraq, just as President Bush tries to gain some traction on the issue....
>>Another story has surfaced about some controversy with the National Guard. Here is an excerpt from the Kennebec Journal:Last week, state National Guard officials were apparently misinformed or uninformed about a significant Pentagon policy change affecting soldier deployments to Iraq. The rampant confusion in evidence was a cruel and unconscionable disservice to our soldiers and their families, for whom such changes in policy can be matters of life and death. We hope it gets sorted out soon.
In brief, the day after President Bush announced that he would send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq to contain that nation's growing civil war, Gov. John Baldacci and Maine National Guard Adjutant Gen. John Libby held a press conference to reassure Maine's Guard families that citizen-soldiers would be unaffected by the increase. Libby told reporters that the president's plan would have "no immediate impact on Maine National Guard men and women."
Not so fast.
Evidently, at almost the same time, Pentagon officials were announcing in Washington that they were discarding longstanding policy that limited to 24 months the cumulative amount of time a Guard or Reserve member could serve. Citizen-soldiers could thus come home after serving the time they signed up for -- and be sent right back.
While the Pentagon spokespeople took great pains to say that the change in policy didn't mean they were actually going to do it, the shift was a frightening blow to military families and triggered a spate of panicked telephone calls to legislators. And the state's top National Guard official as well as the governor, who had made public statements reassuring Maine families, looked like they were victims of Pentagon carelessness. "This is not what we were told today," said a spokesman for General Libby. "This is not what we were briefed on." Indeed, it now looks like at least one Maine squadron out of Bangor -- the 112th Medical Airlift unit -- will be mobilized in 2008 as a result of this change....
While the White House and the Pentagon play games with words, they are adding stress and danger to the lives of our men and women in uniform. Since they cannot justify the war, they cannot justify the increase in troops.