New York--The indictment of I.Lewis "Scooter" Libby by Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgeraldprovides the mostcogent and visible evidence to date of thecriminal mindset thatexists inside the Bush administrationregarding the decisionto invade Iraq.
The indictment is linked toLibby's involvement in illegally revealing the identity of a covertCIA operative, Valerie Plame, in violation of U.S. law, and theresultant conspiracy to deny and cover up the fact that this crimehad in fact taken place.But the real crimecommitted here is the deception leading to war carried out by theBush administration, in particular the activities of the vicepresident, Dick Cheney,and his chief of staff, "Scooter" Libby, which is why they felt theyneeded to go after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife,Plame.
The outing of Plame was just the tip of thiscriminal enterprise. The specific charge--making false statements toa grand jury--is in fact the best indicator of the true nature of thecrimes committed by Libby and, by extension, the Bush administration.
Acting at the behest of the vice president, Libbywas a key figure behind inserting dubious and unverified intelligencedata alleging the existence of Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction into the public arena, eitherby leaking this information to reporters such as The New York Times'Judith Miller, or by having it referenced in high-profile speechessuch as the president's 2003 State of the Union Address or ColinPowell's now-infamous presentation to the Security Council inFebruary 2003.
Cheney and Libby were behind the decision tomislead Congress, in particular the Senate Select Committee onIntelligence's investigation into the reasons why the U.S.intelligence community had gotten it so wrong about Iraqi WMDcapabilities. (Contrary to the much-hyped case made by the Bushadministration in justifying the decision to invade Iraq, no WMD werefound in Iraq, and the CIA subsequently acknowledged that all IraqiWMD had been destroyed by the summer of 1991).
To Cheney and Libby, Joseph Wilson had committedthe ultimate sin when he publicly challenged President Bush's casefor war with Iraq by exposing the fraudulent nature of theadministration's very public claims that Iraq had attempted toacquire uranium "yellowcake" from Niger.
If true, the "yellowcake" story would havebolstered the president and vice president's assertions that Iraq hadresurrected its nuclear weapons program, thus legitimizing the casefor war. But the reality is that the "yellowcake" claim, like all ofthe Cheney- and Libby-peddled intelligence, was specious, in thiscase derived from forged documents.
Wilson's exposure of this fraud was seen not onlyas an act of betrayal, but also rightly recognized as a threat to theentire charade that was the Bush administration's fabricated case forwar. If left unchallenged, Wilson's claims could have initiated aprocess that would have unraveled the entire fabric of deception andlies woven by Cheney, Libby and the Bush administration about thenon-existent Iraqi WMD threat. As far as Cheney and Libby wereconcerned, truth was the enemy, and truth-tellers were to be attackedand destroyed.
And now the lies have come home to roost. But theindictment of Libby must not be the final punctuation in this tragictale of lies and deception. Instead, it should serve as a much-neededboost for Congress, the media and ultimately the American people tocarry out a massive re-examination of the totality of the processesthat took place in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
The lies of Cheney, Libby and the Bushadministration regarding Iraqi WMD did not take place in a vacuum.Congressional checks and balances, especially in the form of relevantoversight committees, were non-existent; the few hearings held servedas little more than sham hearings designed to amplify a case for warthat was accepted at face value, without question, despite the factthat all involved knew the supporting evidence was eithernon-existent or paper-thin.
The fourth estate was likewise reduced to littlemore than a propagandistic extension of the White House and Pentagon,losing any claim to journalistic integrity through its slavishparroting, without question, of anything that painted SaddamHussein's regime in a negative light, especially when it came to theissue of retained WMD. At the receiving end of this tangled web oflies and incompetence are the American people. Having been duped intoa war that has to date cost the lives of over 2,000 members of thearmed forces (not to mention hundreds of our coalition partners andtens of thousands of Iraqis), the question now is how the citizenryof the world's most powerful representative democracy will respond.
Void of a major backlash on the part of theAmerican people in response to the deliberate falsification anddeceit that has transpired regarding Iraq and the now-debunked casefor war, the Libby indictment may prove to be little more than anexercise in damage control.
Already senior Republican officials, such asTexas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, are calling the Libby indictment amere "technicality." Right-wing pundits refer to the indictment asthe "criminalization of politics," as if lying one's way into anillegal war of aggression is somehow akin to politics as usual.
If the American people go along with such blatantattempts at obscuring the reality of the criminal conspiracy that hasbeen committed, then it is perhaps time we finally lay to rest thisexperiment we call American democracy. At the very minimum, Congressshould be compelled into action. The Senate Select Committee onIntelligence, and in particular its two senior senators, PatRobertson, R-Kan., and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va, should not onlycomplete their investigation into how the
Bush administration used (or misused)intelligence to formulate Iraq policy, but also re-open its initialreport into the so-called "intelligence failure" regarding the flawedWMD assessments, with the intent to indict any and all who conspiredto keep relevant information from, or made false statements to, thatcommittee during the conduct of its original investigation.
There must be a wider investigation into thetotality of the criminal conspiracy undertaken by the Bushadministration to defraud Congress and the American people about theissue of war with Iraq, and in particular the case used to justifythe invasion of that country. The crime that was committed goes farbeyond the outing of a rogue diplomat's CIA-affiliated spouse, asserious as that charge may be. The deliberate and systematic mannerin which the Bush administration, from the president on down, peddledmisleading, distorted and fabricated information to Congress and theAmerican people represents a frontal assault on the very system ofgovernment the United States of America proclaims to champion.
ScottRitter is a formerchief U.N. weapons inspector who participated in 52 missions in Iraq,14 of which he led. He is theauthorof the newly released"Iraq Confidential: TheUntold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the U.N. andOverthrow SaddamHussein" (NationBooks).
Published on Saturday, October 29, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
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