Rick Kaplan is about to walk in the door as EP at CBS News. Maybe the first thing he should do is beg Eric Engberg to come out of retirement. Engberg is an old CBS Washington hand, who is not best loved by people whose condemnations I tend to regard as commendations.

In a more innocent age – OK, the early 90s – Engberg once did a jig around a Baghdad hotel room with a British male reporter (still working) who was wearing women’s clothes. Despite Engberg’s clumsy waltz style he was a cracking turn as a live reporter.

Anyway here are some high-lights of his take on the Libby trial, and wise and entertaining it is too – spot the key line (hint: it’s underlined):

QUESTION #1 – Why did Vice President Cheney order Scooter Libby to conduct the smear campaign against the Wilsons when he could have easily picked up the phone and called a few Administration-friendly reporters, like Bob Novak and Judy Miller, and do the leaking himself?

ANSWER – Cheney knew he needed what in intelligence work is called a “cutout,” because he understood perfectly well that revealing the identity of a CIA undercover agent was morally wrong and almost certainly illegal. The juror who said Scooter was a “fall guy” had it right. But doesn’t that make Cheney both a shameless manipulator and a terrible coward?

The premeditated nature of the attack on Joe Wilson can be assessed further by the fact that Libby, given Cheney’s direction, did not peddle the Plame outing to an obvious Administration fugleman such as Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. The carefully conceived plot called for a Wilson-Plame revelation that looked like real journalism, not propaganda.

QUESTION #3 – Wasn’t Libby really just a patriotic official trying to advance his government’s interests?

ANSWER – …Libby was convicted of telling the FBI and a grand jury that NBC’s Tim Russert was the source of his information that Plame was a CIA agent. That lie carried the potential of painting a prosecutorial bulls eye on the back of Russert, who was an innocent bystander. Outside the Beltway, there is a technical phrase for this type of lie: Back stabbing. Why would Scooter do such a thing? Because the press has a tradition of refusing to cooperate with leak investigations and he assumed that Russert would refuse to talk to the FBI or the prosecutor, risking time in jail for contempt. In short, Scooter is a weasel.

QUESTION #4 – Why was Cheney, who is paid for being the second ranking official in the government and who, we are led to believe, is often running said government, messing around in press spin and character assassination?

ANSWER – Cheney comes across in the testimony as a grudge-bearing, Queegishly obsessive (“Who ate those strawberries?”) character. So, thanks to all you Beltway political pundits (and I was one of them) who applauded Bush for naming him to the ticket in 2000 on the grounds that he would provide a mature, sensible voice in an otherwise inexperienced administration…

QUESTION #5 – Doesn’t this case demonstrate … that the MSM establishment … failed in its responsibility to provide readers with an honest explanation of what the government was doing?

ANSWER – No, just the opposite. Scooter was ordered by Cheney to spread the story that Joe Wilson was on a junket arranged by his wife when he traveled to Africa in search of information about Iraqi weapons programs. So Scooter fed this tale to NY Times reporter Judy Miller. Miller pitched the story to her editors, who declined to pursue such an obvious smear. Anyone with newsroom experience can almost hear the Times editor in question saying, “A trip to Niger, Africa – not to be confused with Cancun – was a junket? Come on, Judy, get serious.” That’s what editors are paid to do, evaluate the information coming in over the transom and deep-sixing self-serving spin and out-and-out garbage.

Bring him back!