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July 03, 2007

Special Report Roundtable - July 3

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I took this decision very seriously on Mr. Libby. I considered his background, his service to the country, as well as the jury verdict. And I felt like the jury verdict ought to stand. And I felt like some of the punishments that the judge determined were adequate and should stand. But I felt like the 30-month sentencing was severe.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: And so, he commuted the sentence of Scooter Libby.

That had brought reaction from a number of Democrats. Joe Wilson said that Libby is a traitor. Hillary Clinton said that it was an example of the president's cronyism. And John Conyers, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said he really won't be surprised to learn old hearings.

Some thoughts on all this now from Fred Barnes, Executive Editor of The Weekly Standard, Mara Liasson, National Political Correspondent for National Public Radio, and Mort Kondracke, executive editor for "Roll Call," FOX News contributors all.

Having said, Fred, that he thought that the jury verdict ought to stand, he also said that he didn't foreclose any other options, which means that the full pardon option would seem to be open. But that would become, then, a contradiction of what he said about the jury verdict. Wouldn't it?

FRED BARNES, EXECUTIVE EIDTOR, WEEKLY STANDARD: No, not necessarily. You can pardon for different reasons. One, you can pardon for mercy, you can pardon because you think it was a miscarriage of justice, or you can pardon for political reasons.

Other presidents have done this. George Washington pardoned the perpetrators of the Whiskey Rebellion, and Thomas Jefferson, you know, those convicted under the Alien and Sedition Act. This goes way back to the founders.

Remember, Bush's father pardoned Caspar Weinberger when he had been indicted for some connection--I forget what it was--with the Iran Contra. And that was a political use of the pardon, or this case, of the commuting power for political reasons. I think that is what he has done here. And--

HUME: This is political, in other words. This isn't because the sentence was too harsh, this was for politics?

BARNES: Well, he does think the sentence was too hash, but there are lots of sentences that are too harsh. I think he did this for those reasons.

But it's a different kind of pardon. There is an ordinary pardon, and you would have sent that through the Justice Department, and they have an office there that tells you whether it meets certain standards or not. He didn't do that. You don't do that with the sort of political pardons, and, look, this goes back to the founders.

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Look, I agree with the political pardon, and the reaction to it is completely and utterly political, and partisan. Democrats are up in arms about this Republicans, for the most part, and conservatives are satisfied, although some of them would have liked him to go even further and given a complete pardon.

HUME: I have seen a fair amount of reaction from conservatives, not conservatives serving in public office, but others that are indignant that it wasn't a full pardon.

I still think this goes a long way to satisfy conservatives, it does. And Fred Thompson, who had been kind of the loudest voice on the campaign trail for this, is for it. And I just think that this is--

HUME: And Giuliani is saying--

LIASSON: Giuliani accepts it. Giuliani always finds some way to say something without waving the flag about it. But Giuliani accepts it. We haven't heard from everybody else.

I just think this is pretty predictable. I don't think this is going to move the meter a lot on either side. As we talked about yesterday, people who don't like the president aren't going to like this. And people who still have some shred of support for him are going to be satisfied.

HUME: Well, the democratic reaction, being that they control Congress, about to have a firestorm that we are going to be having. Congress says they will hold hearings. Are we going to hearing about this for weeks to come, now?

MORT KONDRACKE, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, ROLL CALL: Well, they are out of town, so they haven't had a chance to cogitate together. But Conyers instant reaction was that he is going to investigate this to see whether there is something nefarious going on.

And the line among some liberals, anyway, is that, as Joe Wilson, for example, said, that the president is guilty of an obstruction of justice here. And the theory of this is that had Scooter Libby faced jail, that he was certainly going to blab about all the internal workings of the White House, and how lies were told about how we got into the Iraq war, and so this was done to silence him.

And one of the people who came very near to buying into this thing was Hillary Clinton, who said that was clearly an effort to protect the White House. There isn't any doubt, now, that Libby was carrying out the implicit or explicit wishes of Vice President, or maybe the President as well, in an effort to stifle it.

HUME: How about that?

BARNES: That's a conspiracy theory. And these lefties now remind me of conservatives back in the 50's. They now see a conspiracy under every rug. There is no evidence for this theory.

Joe Wilson said the president lied, or somebody--he ought to know about lies, since he has told so many himself. But the notion--I mean, Hillary Clinton is wise not to be more explicit about this conspiracy theory, because there is no evidence of it whatsoever.

HUME: Good issue for her?

LIASSON: Yes, sure, it's a good issue.

HUME: Or is it really just something where she speaks to the choir on this.

LIASSON: She is speaking to the choir, but it's a good issue for here.

HUME: Even given the record of her husband having pardoned all those people, Mark Rich and all of those people on the last day?

LIASSON: If this was a general election, I would agree with you, you don't want to bring up the issue of pardons if you are Hilary Clinton. But in a Democratic primary, where the feelings are so strong against the president and the republicans, I don't think it's a problem.

KONDRACKE: Yes, I think it is a contest among the Democrats to out- Bush bash each other. And so Hillary is a ratcheting it up one more notch, and I'm sure it is a crowd pleaser.

BARNES: Bush isn't on the ballot next year, however.

KONDRACKE: That makes him all the better a target.

HUME: Next up with the panel we will talk about the terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom and what they may mean. Stay tuned.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARTIN NAVIAS, SECURITY ANALYST: What stopped this plot has come to light, highlights and number of the serious problems in the United Kingdom, both in terms of immigration and how the border controls in this country are being managed, how the National Health Service is recruiting personnel, and whether our security services, with all the efforts that they have undertaken now, actually, still missing groups of people who are intent on plotting terrorists outrages in this country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: For a terrorist plot that in almost all respects was a complete failure, this one seems to have killed a lot of people, not least because the perpetrators were doctors, which, as you heard, that security expert suggests raises questions about Britain's national health system, where they are getting doctors. It raises questions about whether people are getting into that country even despite everything that has been done, and perhaps into other countries as well, that are intent on doing great harm.

What about this thing? What does this tell us?

BARNES: It tells us again that the radicals Islamism is an ideology. It's a political ideology with religious underpinnings that has nothing to do with people growing up deprived, and poor, and so on. These are well educated people, as were the 9/11 terrorists. These doctors certainly were.

And it also tells you when George Brown, the new Prime Minster says that this is al-Qaeda.

HUME: Gordon Brown --

BARNES: Gordon Brown, sorry.

Anyway, this al-Qaeda thing is not like al-Qaeda attacking the U.S. on 9/11. There, the instructions and the training were all done by Usama bin Laden, and so on. Now it is all these, basically, independent groups that may be inspired by al-Qaeda, but they are not taking orders and getting plans from Usama bin Laden. It is quite decentralized, and that is more difficult to deal with.

LIASSON: Yes, it is al-Qaeda-like, or al-Qaeda inspired. But they were home grown--or, at least, they weren't home grown in terms of being British nationals--but they seemed to operate on their own. In other words, without some kind of control from abroad.

And also, it was a pretty low-tech affair. Granted it didn't work, but what they tried to do was relatively simple technologically. All you have to do is make a car bomb and detonate it somehow.

And it sounds like if there are going to be more terrorist attacks here, it's very possible that those are the kinds that we might see, something relatively simple.

I have to say that the British seem to be pretty on top of this in terms of keeping tabs on Muslim extremists. They might have missed these guys, but--

HUME: They have cameras in the streets all over major cities. Senator Lieberman is now talking about how we ought to do that here. How would that go down?

KONDRACKE: The ACLU would hate it. And the Democrats want to spend a lot of money on homeland security, but they want to spend it on first responders and radios, and stuff like that, after the fact.

But I haven't heard anybody advocating hundreds of thousands of cameras all over the country watching everybody, and that does work. I mean, there are loads of crimes that really get solved because there were cameras around it--at ATM machines and other places. And you can get a traffic ticket, now, or a speeding ticket by camera.

HUME: And you have, right?

BARNES: And I have it.

HUME: How you knew.

KONDRACKE: So I think that that is something that ought to be adopted in this country.

BARNES: We ought to point out that a terror attack doesn't have to be successful in terms of killing a lot of people in order to terrorize the public. It does create terror. People in England and Scotland know how much more vulnerable they are now. They are obviously sacred by even these failed attacks.

And think about the one in London, what they tried to do there was, one, they had a car planted outside a nightclub which would be packed, mainly with women, and then the other car nearby was to go off after that first explosion, and then everybody comes to try to help the victims--

HUME: And they kill all them.

BARNES: And then they kill all them.

And in Scotland, in Glasgow, school was just out. And they knew kids were going to be all over the airport. And these are the people they were trying to kill, women and children.

KONDRACKE: What is curious here is, if this was, as Catherine Herridge, reported, al-Qaeda in Iraq, how come it didn't work? And apparently the bomb in London would not the have worked. You could not set a propane tank ablaze to blow up with a gasoline explosion. It doesn't work that way.

HUME: What you are saying is al-Qaeda in Iraq is more proficient?

KONDRACKE: I would think so, yes.

HUME: If it is decentralized, maybe that explains the reason. They had the second string over at London, or something.

BARNES: It is still worrisome.

LIASSON: Yes, and it is just a matter of time before they get better.

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