Libby affair another travesty
News bulletin: George W. Bush doesn’t give a flying fandango what you peasants think. If commuting Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s prison sentence for obstruction of justice and perjury proved nothing else, it’s this president’s sheer contempt for the rule of law, not to mention for his own easily duped supporters.
Not that many in the nation’s esteemed political press are showing much concern, either. During a recent online “chat” with readers, Washington Post national political reporter Shailagh Murray responded: “YAAWWN. That’s my view of the Libby flap. What on earth did people expect Bush to do?”
Gee, I don’t know. Maybe stand by his public vow that whoever exposed CIA operative Valerie Plame’s covert identity would be punished? Do his constitutional duty to see that the laws be faithfully executed? As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald observes sarcastically: “What could possibly be more boring or irrelevant than the president of the United States protecting one of his most powerful aides, now a convicted felon, from going to prison, thereby ensuring that that aide has no incentive to disclose what he knows?”
This would be the same Washington Post, incidentally, that apparently gave more play to Bill Clinton’s lies about playing slap and tickle with Monica Lewinsky than to Hurricane Katrina and the invasion of Afghanistan, combined. Too bad Clinton didn’t use the Libby defense: “Oh, THAT Miss Lewinsky. I thought you meant somebody else. I was so busy I forgot.”
But what might Scooter know? See, that’s where things get interesting. Because the secondary purpose of “outing” Valerie Plame wasn’t simply to belittle her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, for exposing President Bush’s falsehood about Saddam Hussein buying uranium for nuclear bombs in Africa. It was clearly to intimidate anybody else in the CIA who might think about blowing the whistle on the propaganda concocted to sell Americans on invading Iraq.
Where was that campaign conceived? Mainly in the White House office of Deadeye Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, Scooter Libby. They made many trips to the CIA and other agencies to browbeat skeptical analysts into hyping Iraq’s imaginary nuclear threat. “Stovepiping,” they called it: forcing dubious or downright fraudulent data through the system by a combination of ideological certitude, dogged repetition and sheer intimidation.
Thus, too, came the endlessly repeated lie that Plame was never a covert agent but a glorified secretary or errand girl. In fact, documents produced at Libby’s trial showed Plame was operations chief for the Joint Task Force on Iraq, part of the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA’s clandestine operations directorate.
Trial testimony showed Libby had improperly discussed Plame with half a dozen government employees and several reporters, including The New York Times’s Judith Miller, weeks before Novak broke the story. He then claimed he’d forgotten knowing Plame’s covert identity until NBC’s Tim Russert told him, which Russert denied.
Who, then, did tell Libby? Deadeye Dick Cheney, who instructed him to leak the information to the ever-helpful Miller. When the time came to testify in Libby’s defense, however, Cheney was far away in distant Afghanistan.
And because Libby won’t get his pardon until some time after the 2008 election, he retains Fifth Amendment rights and can’t be forced to testify.
Slick, ain’t it?
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].