The Libby Indictment: A Deceit Not To Be Endured
If you think the indictment of Scooter Libby is where the Plame-Wilson Case will end, you are unwisely mistaken.
By Jeff Koopersmith

Nov. 2, 2005 / PHILADELPHIA (apj.us) / I received a note from a Chicago colleague the other day who had taken time from celebrating the White Sox World Series win to remind me that he was particularly familiar with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald – who, as you may remember, is also from the Windy City.

Fitzgerald brought five felony charges against Vice President Cheney's "brain," Mr. Irving Lewis Libby (a.k.a. "Scooter") – charges that did not include violating national security laws surrounding the outing of Central Intelligence Agency covert operatives, the smartest of the smart who risk their lives for the nation's security and take responsibility for the well-being of other undercover fathers, mothers and husbands around the world.

Make no mistake about this fundamental fact: outing any covert CIA agent is tantamount to setting them and others up for blackmail, torture, and/or murder.

Such was the importance of Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joe Wilson who traveled to Niger at the request of the CIA to investigate potentially exaggerated claims made by the British that Saddam Hussein was developing a nuclear arsenal – claims conveniently adopted by the President of the United States to make his case for war against Iraq while providing cover that it was the British who tipped us to this dire threat.

As an aside, it makes no difference whatsoever whether or not Valerie Plame Wilson may have suggested to her peers at the CIA that her husband – a respected former United States ambassador who maintained connections throughout Africa – be sent to Africa to attempt to test the veracity of the Bush Administration claim that Iraq might fire a nuclear warhead at any moment.

At that time, you may recall, the CIA was dead-set against actors in the White House and elsewhere who were hell-bent on going to war with Iraq. The most senior officials at the CIA were suspicious of these seemingly too-convenient claims made by the White House to the American people and to the United Nations.

Something seemed amiss – and the CIA was spending quite an effort to find out what it might be.

Ambassador Wilson went to Niger to determine, for the CIA – not for the White House – whether Iraq had actually attempted or been successful to obtain the "yellowcake" uranium ore necessary for the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

We all now know not only that Saddam Hussein's plans for developing a nuclear arsenal failed long before, but that Saddam possessed no weapons of mass destruction following several years of searches during American occupation of Iraq.

We also know that Ambassador Wilson, overcome with anger and distrust of the Bush Administration's apparent rush headlong into war, wrote an article published in the New York Times about the lack of confirming proof that yellow cake had been sought by Iraq.

Immediately upon publication of the article, the White House launched an attack on Wilson's veracity and "outed" his wife as a CIA operative.

That's about all we know for certain, save the trickle of facts that Neocon Nosferatus like Robert Novak wrote about Ms. Plame-Wilson and her career, knowing that public discussion of CIA employees is at best a dangerous to those agents, and at worst treasonous.

We also know that Novak and others of his ilk did so to delight their favorite White House leakers and guarantee future access to insider information from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In common parlance, it's good to kiss the rear ends of top-level White House staffers – it's "Pulitzer Good."

We also now know that Vice President Richard "Dick" Cheney was also aware of Ms. Plame's classified position CIA employ, along with Karl Rove – the President's brain – and, curiously, most if not all of the "White House Iraq Group," a tight-knit cabal within a cabal originally assembled to justify taking out Saddam. Once Wilson's New York Times article hit print, their first priority changed: besmirch Wilson and Plame at every opportunity.

Even today, Neoconservative policy prostitutes openly and repeatedly call Wilson "a liar" in both a reactionary and nausea-inducing defense of Mr. Libby and an attempt to convince the same Americans sheep who voted for this Administration – twice – that Libby is simply a splendid American patriot playing normal politics – children's games.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

If this variety of is a sport, it is one so scurrilous and terrifying that it threatens the national security and fundamental Constitutional underpinnings of our nation.

What Mr. Fitzgerald's indictment of Mr. Libby asks us to believe is that Libby acted alone – doing something (we know not what) – and that he lied about it to the Grand Jury. Mr. Fitzgerald does not offer any explanation as to why he chose not to indict Mr. Libby or others for leaking Ms. Plame's name and position to reporters and others not cleared to receive such information although such is clearly the case.

There are many "Whys" surrounding the Plame-Wilson affair, but one of the biggest is how in God's name Mr. Fitzgerald thinks he can escape unscathed after indicting Libby only for lies so blatant that Fitzgerald had no other choice – yet ignoring the underlying felonies he was charged with investigating in the first place.

Two of those crimes, and there may be more, are conspiracy and outing a covert CIA agent – yet the special counsel, lauded by the right as both the Einstein and Mother Teresa of the prosecutorial world, indicted Mr. Libby – it seems – for preventing the prosecutor from finding the truth and proving these crimes.

In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald tells us clearly that Mr. Libby single-handedly blocked him from finding the truth.

As my friend in Chicago wrote, this is "patently absurd" as surely as Oliver North was a convicted felon.

Consider this fact: conspirators lie to the FBI and grand juries all the time. It appears that Mr. Rove, who had to make four appearance before Mr. Fitzgerald's grand jury, may have realized that the "jig was up" and came in one last time to correct, rectify, adjust, cover up, and remedy his own likely fabrications when it became apparent that Fitzgerald was going to indict someone – and possibly more than one person.

What is yet more amazing is that Mr. Fitzgerald, after learning all he did about other potential co-conspirators on the "Get Wilson" team, did not attempt to drive the Vice President himself in front of a grand jury even if he failed under privilege arguments.

Here, in a nutshell, is what I think in fact happened:

• For years – meaning before Bush seized the White House in 2001 – Libby, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney and other close advisors to the President and Vice President were itching to invade Iraq and invalidate the damage they perceived President George H. "41" Bush Sr. made in 1991 by allowing Saddam's regime to survive.

• Whether or not Saddam was allowed to survive and in fact prosper in a further attempt to enrich the business interests of the Bush family or simply their allies is unclear – but ask anyone at the Carlyle Group whether an over-a-decade reprieve for Saddam helped their bottom line. The answer must be a resounding "Yes." The Carlyle Group provides huge amounts of income to the Bush clan, the Saudi royal family, and others linked to the underbelly of the Middle East.

• Every American today knows in his or her heart and mind that almost everything this President, his Cabinet and the White House staff has said to bolster his near-maniacal PR campaign for war against Iraq was based on a lie, was a lie, or was at best a distension and perversion of the truth – especially given the fact that as of today there are more than 2,000 American boys and girls dead in Iraq, along with nearly 20,000 others devoid of legs, arms, genitals and worse, now lying in Veteran's hospitals across the nation, while this President and the Neocon-controlled Congress cut their benefits and deny even news cameras the right to film their heroic but poignant return home in aluminum boxes filled with body bags. And for what?

• Along came former ambassador Joseph Wilson, husband of the very gifted Valerie Plame – a trusted and respected CIA operative and covert intelligence officer in the most secret of our federal agencies – confidential by design to protect those that work for it including typists, secretaries, and librarians who populate not only the buildings at Langley, Virginia but locations all over the world. Revealing any of their CIA connections in the press or to anyone makes these men and women and those associated with them especially savory targets for enemies of this state. Wilson began to talk about his conclusions in Niger after he realized that British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the President of the United States were relying on false information at best, or straight-out lies at worst, about the threat that Saddam purportedly posed to the American people.

• Cheney, Rove, Libby and members of the press who had long-ago prostituted themselves to this administration saw their credibility demolished – quickly and drastically – even though the New York Times and other major news sources decided to generally support the Administration's claims no matter its pose. After all, war is great for business – including the newspaper business, as William Randolph Hearst proved a century ago.

• The President may not have been sharp enough on his own to note the danger of Wilson's threat, but almost immediately he must have been briefed or otherwise been made aware that Wilson posed a serious threat to his presidency – and worse, to his reelection hopes.

• Under no circumstance could Wilson be allowed to injure the president's reputation or threaten the "war effort," and thus a group – surely made up of at least Libby, Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld, I would speculate – sat around now and then, here and there, and formulated a plan to discredit Wilson and send him the message that they wouldn't stop at anything to destroy him – and that would include risking his wife's life and the lives of those who might be working covertly under her management here and abroad.

If this group of devils believed that Saddam did purchase or attempt to purchase yellow cake in Niger, and if they believed that Saddam truly had huge caches of "weapons of mass destruction," then why would the then-little-known Joseph Wilson's op-ed piece in a national newspaper move them to such extremes –including threatening the life of Valerie Plame?

The answer is clear – they knew all along that none of it was true: there were no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear arsenal, no biological warheads, and now – patriot that he is –Libby has chosen to fall on his sword and perhaps spend decades in prison to cover it up while Mr. Fitzgerald awaits his reward for helping out, for aiding and abetting a travesty of justice.

Surely Mr. Fitzgerald must believe his action somehow protect our national security. He is misguided in this belief so completely that even an eleven-year-old would see why: he flaunts the law in the name of patriotism – and that he should not do.

Make no mistake – I believe that if need be, Libby can be counted on to plead guilty rather than allow a trial to unravel this web of deceit. He too most likely thinks that this is the patriotic thing to do.

The notion that Cheney, Rove, Libby, and President Bush never discussed the Plame-Wilson matter is so outrageous that Mr. Fitzgerald made every effort at his press conference last week to make certain that such a supposition could not be brought up by members of the press so-inclined, though they are fewer in number every day that passes.

The very fact that Mr. Fitzgerald is absolutely convinced that Mr. Libby lied repeatedly should have vitalized his effort to prove the crimes that must have been committed, crimes that forced Mr. Libby to feel he had to lie to the Grand Jury time and time again to protect someone other than himself.

Yet Mr. Fitzgerald was not invigorated to find the truth no matter where it lay. For some reason – unexplained – Mr. Fitzgerald threw in the towel and "Nerfed" the White House with the softest criminal ball ever thrown.

There is no other explanation for Libby's lies, nor any other excuse Mr. Fitzgerald or his successors may use – with a straight face – to excuse this caricature of prosecutorial largesse.

While Fitzgerald led us to believe that he is about to wrap up his investigation, I remain confident that others within the government will not allow this to happen and will pick up that ball and run with it.

That burden – to find the truth and uphold the law – is the sworn obligation of members of Congress, the Attorney General, and the President himself and will not go ignored.

Someone will stand up and say "I have had enough" and spill the vinegary beans in order to re-instill confidence in the Executive branch and Congress, confidence that is now frighteningly waning among the super-majority of American citizens and demonstrated by an overabundance of polls showing Americans have little or no faith – not only in their elected and appointed officials from both sides of the aisle, but in the judiciary, the Justice Department, and federal, state and local police authorities.

This cannot stand.

JEFF KOOPERSMITH is a political consultant, opinion research authority, policy analyst, and self-described "renegade lobbyist."