Yes, free Libby.(on the right)(Lewis Libby)

NEW YORK, JUNE 8

THE talk about a pardon for Lewis Libby is food for thought. Partisans are grateful that there is time, even if not much time, to think, pending the appeals that are under way challenging the conviction at a technical level.

There isn't much to hope for here from Libby's point of view. The evidence appears to have been overwhelming that he lied to the FBI, and that in so doing he hindered the execution of justice.

But appeals, even if judicially unpromising, are politically useful. President Bush can legitimately postpone action--or prolong inaction--by waiting for the appeals to make their appointed rounds. But he has other things to weigh besides formal guilt. The reason is that although Libby is certainly guilty of having lied, he is not, in the view of weighty arbiters of the law, deserving of a jail sentence.

What he did was to involve himself in a security matter of no consequence. It was of no consequence at the time Libby figured in the proceedings because the nature of Joseph Wilson's mission to Niger had already been revealed in the press, and his wife, Valerie Plame, was already moving out of the covert branch of the CIA. The underlying issue had to do with the authority of the United States to conceal the true commission of people acting covertly for U.S. intelligence.

My own involvement in such a deception became known many years after I practiced it, when a holy member of the liberal elite (the Rev. William Sloane Coffin) dropped the word to somebody that when I was in Mexico City ostensibly doing work for my father, I was actually there doing work for the CIA.

If, while in Mexico, I had been asked by the authorities what I was doing there, my duty would have been to deceive, and I'd have done so without any sense of debt-deferred to my father confessor. The U.S. law making it a crime to disclose the identity of a covert agent is designed to protect such operatives.