WALLACE: And you helped raise millions of dollars for his extraordinary
legal expenses. Would President Thompson — you like the sound of that probably.
Would President Thompson pardon Libby now or would you wait until all of his
legal appeals are exhausted?

THOMPSON: I'd do it now.

WALLACE: Because?

THOMPSON: I'd do it now. This is a trial that never would have been brought
in any other part of the world. This is a miscarriage of justice.

One man and his wife and 14-year-old and 10-year-old children are bearing
the brunt of a political maelstrom here that produced something that never
should have come about.

These people knew in the very beginning — the Justice Department, this
Justice Department and the special counsel knew in the very beginning that the
thing that was creating the controversy, who leaked Valerie Plame's name, did
not constitute a violation of the law.

And then they knew that it — someone did leak the name. And it was Mr.
Armitage. It wasn't Scooter Libby.

But he evidently wasn't a designated bad guy, so they passed over that and
spent the next year drilling in a dry well and finally got some inconsistencies
or some failure to remember out of Mr. Libby and made a prosecution out of it
and went to trial on a he-said, she-said perjury case and faulty memory, when
practically every witness in the trial either had inconsistent statements, told
the FBI one thing, told the grand jury something else, inconsistent between the
witnesses that were presented at the case, and sometimes both.

And yet at the end of the day, the only person that the jury got an
opportunity to pass judgment on was Scooter Libby. It's not fair. And I would do
anything that I could to alleviate that.

At a time when all of our institutions are under assault, when the Presidency
has been diminished and the Congress is viewed with skepticism, our Judiciary
and our court system have remarkably maintained the public's confidence. Now the
President's actions are known to every school child in America. And in the midst
of these partisan battles, many people still think this matter is just `lying
about sex.'

But little by little, there will be a growing appreciation that it
is about much more than that. And in years to come, in every court house in
every town in America, juries, judges, and litigants will have the President's
actions as a bench mark against which to measure any attempted subversion of the
judicial process. The notion that anyone, no matter how powerless, can get equal
justice will be seen by some as a farce.

And our rule of law--the principle that many other countries still dream about--the principle that sets us apart, will have been severely damaged. If this does not constitute damage to our government and our society, I cannot imagine what does. And for that he should be convicted.

Ex-CIA Director George Tenet says the way the Bush administration has used
his now famous "slam dunk" comment — which he admits saying in reference to
making the public case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — is both
disingenuous and dishonorable.

It also ruined his reputation and his career, he tells 60 Minutes Scott
Pelley in his first network television interview. Pelley's report will be
broadcast Sunday, April 29, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

The phrase "slam dunk" didn't refer to whether Saddam Hussein actually had
WMDs, says Tenet; the CIA thought he did. He says he was talking about what
information could be used to make that case when he uttered those words. "We can
put a better case together for a public case. That's what I meant," explains
Tenet.

Months later, when no WMDs were found in Iraq, someone leaked the story to
Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, who then wrote about a Dec. 21, 2002, White House meeting in which the CIA director reportedly "rose up, threw his arms in the air [and said,] 'It's a slam dunk case.' " Tenet says it was a passing
comment, made well after major decisions had already been made to mobilize the
nation for war. The leak effectively made him a scapegoat for the invasion and
ended his career.

"At the end of the day, the only thing you have … is your reputation built
on trust and your personal honor and when you don't have that anymore, well,
there you go," Tenet tells Pelley.

He says he doesn't know who leaked it but says there were only a handful of
people in the room.

"It's the most despicable thing that ever happened to me," Tenet says. "You
don't do this. You don't throw somebody overboard just because it's a
deflection. Is that honorable? It's not honorable to me."

Tenet says to have the president base his entire decision to go to war on
such a remark is unbelievable. "So a whole decision to go to war, when all of
these other things have happened in the run-up to war? You make mobilization
decisions, you've looked at war plans," says Tenet. "I'll never believe that
what happened that day informed the president's view or belief of the legitimacy
or the timing of this war. Never!"

Tenet says what bothers him most is that senior administration officials
like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continue
using "slam dunk" as a talking point.

"And the hardest part of all this has been just listening to this for
almost three years, listening to the vice president go on 'Meet the Press' on
the fifth year [anniversary] of 9/11 and say, 'Well, George Tenet said slam
dunk' as if he needed me to say 'slam dunk' to go to war with Iraq," he tells
Pelley. "And you listen to that and they never let it go. I mean, I became
campaign talk. I was a talking point. 'Look at the idiot [who] told us and we
decided to go to war.' Well, let's not be so disingenuous … Let's everybody just
get up and tell the truth. Tell the American people what really happened."