Pach and I just got back from the courtroom. The jury is having a high old time together. They were to a one grinning from ear to ear, giggling, having the time of their lives. Pach noted that none of them looked at Libby, and they did not seem like a group of people who were in disharmony — there wasn’t one who was hanging back, nobody was pissed at somebody who was intractable. They seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the process.
As Pach and I were heading to the elevators, I told him that I suspected that the thing that was happening to the jury is what happened to people on the blogs who got into this story — they got addicted to it. They’re busy sorting through the details, peeling back layers of the onion, fascinated by the process of mutual discovery as they explore the characters and events that led up to the trial. Pach said in his shrinky expert opinion that this made a lot of sense.
I didn’t get the feeling we’re getting out of here any time soon.
Sitting around waiting for the Libby Trial Jury to finish deliberating gets old fast. It’s pretty easy to get frustrated with the Jurors, particularly if you’re a hopelessly biased, mind-already-made-up, anti-Bush, anti-Cheney type that sees this verdict as the key to further investigation of the Administration’s criminal conduct in invading Iraq. But that aside, it’s also an amazing thing that eleven people off the streets of Washington have the final say in something that matters this much.
Jane Hamsher is borrowing a well worn metaphor – the one Freud used to describe psychoanalysis – the careful work of dissecting a personality one layer at a time. Certainly, Patrick Fitzgerald had done exactly that with a whole bushel of onions, putting this case in a format for the Jury to decide. There are comments here and there that he didn’t play the case right, mostly from lawyers schooled in the art of Jury Trials. I disagree. He went over and over the amassed information and distilled it down to the essential facts. He pursued reporters and government officials, none of whom wanted to testify. He threw one in jail for three months, threatened another, and had to go to court repeatedly to force his witnesses to answer simple questions of fact. When he zeroed in on Scooter Libby, an obvious central figure in the outing of Valerie Plame, he realized he was being told a scripted and false story. So he charged Libby with perjury and obstruction of justice, saying he could peel no further if a central witness was lying. His presentation was clear and to the point. The Jury is taking his case seriously, and poring over the details. Good for them.
There are a few other things to say about onions. They stink. And they make people cry. And this case fits both of those descripters. The crime this Trial revolves around is one of the more monsterous in American History. Our elected government took us to war with a country that was no threat, did not provoke us, and had no part in the things given as reasons for the war. In the process, thousands have died and Iraq is in shambles. We’ve betrayed any sense of decency we had and watched our form of government undergo unimaginable revisions. The whole thing stinks to high heaven, and has given us plenty to cry about.
So this Jury carries the weight of the world, and they don’t even get to decide the real case. They’ve just been given specific questions about a few specific things that happened. Even though it’s hardly possible that they can avoid knowing how big their decision is, they’ve been told to ignore the big picture and stick to the snapshot. So while waiting for them is excruciating, one has to respect the centuries that have gone into creating this way of deciding things. "They were to a one grinning from ear to ear, giggling, having the time of their lives" is as hard to hear as it is wonderfully human…
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