Libby trial fruits

Jason Leopold provides a pretty good primer on what the Libby trial has established thus far, particularly one significant detail:

One by one, the witnesses testified: what they knew and when they knew it.

Speaking under the threat of a perjury penalty, the witnesses admitted for the first time that they had played a role in assisting the Office of the Vice President to attack the credibility of a staunch critic of the Iraq War.

The government officials conceded that a coordinated effort to discredit the man who dared to publicly question the Bush administration's rationale for war was hatched long before his name first entered the public record in July 2003. They said they dug up information about his wife's employment with the CIA, knowing that one of their colleagues would leak it to the media in what is believed to have been a retaliatory act against the war critic.

That is perhaps the revelatory aspect of the week-old perjury and obstruction-of-justice trial involving former vice presidential staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Read on if you want nitty-gritty. Leopold has another story for Truthout that claims that, "Cheney's Handwritten Notes Implicate Bush in Plame Affair."