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March 9, 2007
The Libby travesty
"Many American commentators have expressed justifiable outrage over
the perjury convictions of Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, the former aide to
the US Vice President Dick Cheney. The details of this affair are as
tortuous as they are arcane. The essence of the story was an apparent
hunt by the special prosecutor to find the identity of a 'mole' who
leaked the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, allegedly to
discredit her husband Joseph C Wilson IV who had been dispatched to
Niger to check whether Saddam had tried to buy uranium from that
country, and who returned to say he had not done so and that the Bush
administration had 'twisted' the facts in making the case for war
against Iraq. The affair thus became a proxy for an attack upon the
war in Iraq and for the claim that America was taken to war on a lie.
But Libby was not source of the 'leak'. Strangely, the special
prosecutor appears to have known from an early stage that the person
who disclosed Ms Plame's name was Richard Armitage, a former State
Department official and who, far from doing the bidding of the White
House, was no friend of the administration's policy in Iraq. No action
was ever taken against Armitage. Instead, Libby was hung out to dry
for perjury. But the lies he appears to have told on oath concerned
merely the identity of the person who had told him about Ms Plame. And
the person who told the real whopper was none other than Joseph C
Wilson IV himself. As the Washington Post reported:
In conversations with journalists or in a July 6, 2003, op-ed, he
[Wilson] claimed to have debunked evidence that Iraq was seeking
uranium from Niger; suggested that he had been dispatched by Mr.
Cheney to look into the matter; and alleged that his report had
circulated at the highest levels of the administration. A bipartisan
investigation by the Senate intelligence committee subsequently
established that all of these claims were false - and that Mr. Wilson
was recommended for the Niger trip by Ms. Plame, his wife. When this
fact, along with Ms. Plame's name, was disclosed in a column by Robert
D. Novak, Mr. Wilson advanced yet another sensational charge: that his
wife was a covert CIA operative and that senior White House officials
had orchestrated the leak of her name to destroy her career and thus
punish Mr. Wilson.
The partisan furor over this allegation led to the appointment of
special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Yet after two years of
investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald charged no one with a crime for leaking
Ms. Plame's name. In fact, he learned early on that Mr. Novak's
primary source was former deputy secretary of state Richard L.
Armitage, an unlikely tool of the White House. The trial has provided
convincing evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson
by leaking Ms. Plame's identity - and no evidence that she was, in
fact, covert. It would have been sensible for Mr. Fitzgerald to end
his investigation after learning about Mr. Armitage. Instead, like
many Washington special prosecutors before him, he pressed on,
pursuing every tangent in the case.
The anti-war crowd is using the Libby convictions to feed the 'Bush
lied people died' line. But the fact is that, as Debra Saunders
pointed out on RealClearPolitics, the fundamental issue was that all
the evidence suggested that Saddam had indeed sought to buy uranium
from Niger:
When Joseph Wilson returned from Niger, officials who debriefed
him thought that Wilson's information supported the belief that Iraq
had sought uranium in Africa. As The Washington Post editorialized,
'Wilson was the one guilty of twisting the truth' in saying he
debunked the Niger story. The United Kingdom's Butler Commission also
found the Niger story to be 'well-founded.'
Indeed, British intelligence has maintained throughout that, from
their own independent sources, they remain certain that Saddam was
trying to buy uranium from Niger. As the Wall Street Journal furiously
commented about the Bush administration's behaviour during this whole
affair:
Rather than confront Mr. Wilson's lies head on, they became
defensive and allowed a trivial matter to become a threat to the
Administration itself. They allowed Attorney General John Ashcroft to
recuse himself and Mr. Fitzgerald to be appointed even though Justice
officials knew that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had
been the first official to leak Ms. Plame's name to reporters. Mr.
Libby got caught in the eddy not because he was dishonest but because
he was a rare official who actually had the temerity to defend the
President's Iraq policy against Mr. Wilson's lies.
The way the Bush administration mishandled this whole affair is surely
a paradigm for its wider failure to get a grip and its apparent
predilection for monumental own goals"
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