Kenneth Star, call your agent

So here’s my question: Where’s Kenneth Starr when his country needs him? The psalm-singing phony wasn’t much of a prosecutor. His team lost every Whitewater trial but one; his insanely-detailed report on Bill Clinton’s peccadilloes made most Americans end up feeling sorry for the big dope. Even so, Starr definitely knew how to put on a show.

Compare Patrick Fitzgerald, the brilliant career prosecutor currently grinding White House factotum Lewis “Scooter” Libby to fine particles in the same D.C. courthouse. It’s the most important criminal trial in Washington since Watergate, showing how White House partisans concocted a deliberate smear campaign against Ambassador Joe Wilson and his CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame, after Wilson went public about the bogus “intelligence” hyping Iraq’s make-believe nuclear threat.

This even as the White House begins a second semi-hysterical propaganda campaign advancing yet another “pre-emptive” war against Iran, a more formidable foe that has never attacked the U.S. militarily and has no real capacity to do so — a strategic blunder as foolhardy and dangerous as President Kennedy’s “Bay of Pigs” fiasco.

The stakes couldn’t be higher, nor the evidence clearer. Valerie Plame’s covert identity as a CIA operative — she’d headed the agency’s “Joint Task Force on Iraq” — was leaked to reporters by White House officials to discredit and intimidate her husband.

Also, as testimony by former New York Times reporter Judith Miller showed, to scare anybody else in the CIA who might turn whistle-blower. Mess with us? Goodbye career.

Joe Wilson’s bombshell New York Times column accusing the White House of deliberately twisting the evidence about Iraq’s non-existent nukes hadn’t yet appeared. But information the White House knew could only have come from him had appeared in The New York Times and Washington Post. Vice President Dick Cheney, chief imagineer, became furious. He directed Libby, his chief of staff, to dig up whatever he could get on Wilson, and use it.

Hence Libby’s conversations with Miller, the self-described “Miss Run Amok,” whose reporting about Iraq’s WMDs the Times has since repudiated. During her testimony, Miller described Libby as “agitated, frustrated and angry.” He told Miller “that the CIA was trying to backpedal, to distance itself from the unequivocal intelligence estimates through what he called ‘a perverted war of leaks.'”

After columnist Robert Novak took the bait and “outed” Plame, the CIA formally protested. An investigation began. New lies had to be invented. Possibly overconfident because Attorney General John Ashcroft headed the probe, Libby claimed he’d learned Plame’s covert identity from “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert. Alas, Ashcroft had sufficient integrity to step aside, and the hard-nosed, incorruptible career prosecutor Fitzgerald inherited the case.

Documents in Libby’s office showed he’d in fact learned Plame’s identity from Deadeye Dick Cheney. So he claimed that he’d forgotten this trivial fact, only to relearn it from Russert. Yeah, right.

Defense lawyers have bizarrely argued that Libby was set up to take the fall for fellow smear artist Karl Rove, who also participated. They’ve hinted that when Libby and Cheney testify, all will become clear.

I’m betting neither man dares testify. Patrick Fitzgerald ain’t Wolf Blitzer. He’s prosecuted mafia goons and terrorists; Cheney’s snarls won’t scare him. Too bad he’s not a bit more of a showman.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].