I’m always asking students about the characters they’ve created, “What’s their motivation?” Although at some point or other most of us will act irrationally at least once, most behavior is defined by our pursuit of objectives. Asking what someone was trying to do, and therefore why they acted in the way they did, usually tells the tale.

Along a similar line, Deep Throat advised Bob Woodward during the Watergate investigation,  “Follow the money.” If you follow the money, and track who benefits, you find the culprits.
Which brings us to Scooter Libby. Hard as it is for me to imagine, I find I’m spending some part of my thinking yesterday and today feeling sorry for Mr. Libby, who faces up to 30 years in prison. That’s because I can’t understand why he would have gone down the path of exposing one of our own spies, because I can’t track his motivation for having done so. That is, unless he was ordered to do so by someone higher up in the chain of command.

I’m not alone in that theory, as this news report shows. The jury that convicted him — comprised of what sound like very smart and highly trained people, including a former reporter for the Washington Post — also believe that Mr. Libby was acting under orders.

That makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is that our court process doesn’t appear to be headed further up the chain of command.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 3:47 pm and is filed under On reading, Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.