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Thaddeus Stevens · Guest

*Liar in the White House*
By Rupert Cornwell The Independent UK

Wednesday 07 March 2007

/*Cheney aide found guilty in CIA leak case.
Saga of Washington's discredited WMD claims leads to the conviction
for perjury of Dick Cheney's key aide.*/

In a massive new blow to the credibility of the White House,
Vice-President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff Lewis Libby has been
convicted of obstruction of justice, perjury and lying to the FBI,
during the investigation into the leaking of the identity of a CIA agent.

After a seven-week trial, the jury found Libby guilty yesterday on four
of the five counts against him. Ever calm in court, Libby merely blinked
as the verdict was read out. Defence lawyers immediately said they would
seek a fresh trial, and if that failed, lodge an appeal. In theory Libby
faces up to 25 years in jail, though federal sentencing guidelines mean
he is likely to receive a far shorter term.

The case arose from the investigation into the leak in July 2003 of the
name of Valerie Plame, the CIA agent whose husband, the former
ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been a virulent critic of the Iraq war. Ms
Plame's identity was revealed a few days after Mr Wilson had written a
New York Times column debunking White House claims that Saddam Hussein
had sought to buy uranium in Africa, and accusing the Bush
administration of deliberately manipulating pre-war intelligence. Libby
was not accused of leaking the name deliberately, which is a criminal
offence. His crime was to lie to the FBI and the grand jury
investigating the case, by maintaining he only learnt who Ms Plame was
from a reporter, two days before her name appeared in print.

But some of the most celebrated journalists in Washington went into the
witness box to testify they had been told by Libby in person that Mr
Wilson's wife worked for the CIA - in one case three weeks before Libby
said he became aware of the fact.

Defence lawyers contended that if he made a mistake, it was simply
because of a faulty memory caused by pressure of work. But the jury
decided that Libby had directly lied. The motive, one juror explained to
reporters afterwards, was to cover up the involvement of the
Vice-President himself in the campaign to discredit the former ambassador.

In a statement, Mr Cheney said he was "very disappointed with the
verdict". At the White House the mood was equally grim. George Bush
respected the result of the trial, but was "saddened for Scooter Libby
and his family", a spokesman said.

But there is no concealing the extent of the damage. Libby is not only
the most senior Bush administration official to face - and now be
convicted of - criminal charges. As chief of staff to arguably the most
powerful vice-president in US history, he was one of the two or three
most important policy-makers at the White House after the President and
Vice-President.

The trial, in which neither Libby nor his former boss testified, threw
no new light on the handling of the WMD intelligence used to justify the
2003 invasion of Iraq. But it revealed the obsessive sensitivity of the
Vice-President's office to any attack on its pre-war use of
intelligence, and its determination to discredit critics.

At one point the prosecution produced a specimen of the offending
article, annotated by Mr Cheney himself, asking who Mr Wilson was, and
whether he had been sent on his 2002 fact-finding mission to Africa as a
"junket" organised by his wife. The guilty verdict against Libby is thus
bound to tarnish further the reputation of both Mr Bush and Mr Cheney,
whose approval ratings are even lower than those of the President.

Libby, said Denis Collins, one of the 11 jurors, seemed to be the "fall
guy" who had been given the job of talking to reporters by the
Vice-President. There was "a tremendous amount of sympathy" for him, Mr
Collins said, but in the end they could not believe that a man whose
exceptional grasp of detail had been attested to in court had simply
forgotten when and with whom he had discussed Ms Plame.

The chief prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald denied suggestions that he had
made more of the affair than it merited. Mr Fitzgerald was named special
prosecutor in November 2003, after the Justice Department opened an
investigation into the leak.

"We could not walk away from the facts of the case that we knew in
December 2003. Any lie under oath is serious," he said.

Libby's appeal could run for many months through the courts, possibly as
far as the Supreme Court.

If the case is not settled by the time a new president is elected in
November 2008, Mr Bush could pardon Libby.

But Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, flatly
opposed any pardon, saying: "It's about time someone in the Bush
administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate
intelligence and discredit war critics."

*The Fallen War Advocate*

Until October 2005, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was the chief of staff to
Vice-President Dick Cheney and a powerful influence within the White
House, particularly on matters of national security. He was among the
loudest voices making the case for war with Iraq and helped put together
the dossier that Secretary of State Colin Powell notoriously revealed to
the United Nations in the spring of 2003.

A former private lawyer, Libby joined the government in the early 80s,
joining the State Department where he served under his former law
professor Paul Wolfowitz. After a brief departure from government to
return to public practice, Libby returned to work for Mr Wolfowitz at
the Pentagon in 1989.

He was also a founding member of the Project for the New American
Century, a right-wing group seeking the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

When he became Mr Cheney's chief of staff he received the name "germ
boy", so named because of his insistence on universal smallpox vaccination.

But his closeness to the Vice-President also earned him the title "Dick
Cheney's Dick Cheney".

In 1996 Libby published a novel, The Apprentice, that told the story of
a group of travellers stranded in northern Japan in 1903. The publishers
described it as "an everyday tale of bestiality and paedophilia in 1903
Japan... [and] packed with sexual perversion, dwelling on prepubescent
girls and their training as prostitutes".

*A Liar in the White House*
By Andrew Buncombe

*The Lie*

The Blair Government's September 2002 dossier claims Saddam Hussein has
sought to buy uranium for his nuclear weapons programme from Niger.
George Bush, in his State of the Union address in January 2003, ignores
CIA reservations and repeats the assertion. The claim becomes a central
plank in the argument for war.

*The Doubts*

The CIA dispatches a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, to investigate
the Niger claims, which he concludes are false. Related documents are
subsequently obtained by Italian authorities and passed to the UN
nuclear agency which declares them to be crude forgeries in March 2003,
just before the invasion.

*The Whistle-Blower*

When no WMD are found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, Joseph Wilson
accuses the Bush administration of deliberately manipulating
intelligence before the war. His views are first aired in an
off-the-record interview with The Independent on Sunday in June of that
year, before he goes public in American newspapers.

*The Smear Campaign*

Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson's wife, is identified as an undercover
agent by columnist Robert Novak on 14 July 2003 and the search is on for
the source of the leak within the Bush administration, accused of
deliberately smearing Ms Plame while potentially endangering her life by
exposing her as a CIA agent. Revealing a CIA agent's identity is against
the law.

*The Cover-up*

A special prosecutor is appointed to uncover the leaker, with suspicion
falling on the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, whose chief of
staff, Lewis Libby, takes pains to protect his boss. Although no charges
are brought over the leak itself, Mr Libby is put on trial for trying to
frustrate the investigation.

*The Conviction*

Lewis Libby becomes the first Bush administration official to be
convicted over the flawed intelligence used to justify the war when he
is found guilty yesterday of obstructing justice, lying and perjury. He
faces up to 25 years in jail. Many in Washington say it was, in effect,
the trial of Mr Cheney, who was responsible for the actions of his aide.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2334910.ece
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~_____________________________________~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

TODAY as never before in their history Americans are enthralled with
military power. The global military supremacy that the United States
presently enjoys—and is bent on perpetuating—has become central to our
national identity. More than America's matchless material abundance or
even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation's arsenal of high-tech
weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify
who we are and what we stand for.
When it comes to war, Americans have persuaded themselves that the
United States possesses a peculiar genius. Writing in the spring of
2003, the journalist Gregg Easterbrook observed that "the extent of
American military superiority has become almost impossible to
overstate." During Operation Iraqi Freedom, U.S. forces had shown beyond
the shadow of a doubt that they were "the strongest the world has ever
known,... stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions
at the height of Roman power." Other nations trailed "so far behind they
have no chance of catching up."1 The commentator Max Boot scoffed at
comparisons with the German army of World War II, hitherto "the gold
standard of operational excellence." In Iraq, American military
performance had been such as to make "fabled generals such as Erwin
Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison."2
Easterbrook and Boot concurred on the central point: on the modern
battlefield Americans had located an arena of human endeavor m which
their flair for organizing and deploying technology offered an
apparently decisive edge. As a consequence, the United States had (as
many Americans have come to believe) become masters of all things military.
Further, American political leaders have demonstrated their intention of
tapping that mastery to reshape the world in accordance with American
interests and American values. That the two are so closely intertwined
as to be indistinguishable is, of course, a proposition to which the
vast majority of Americans subscribe. Uniquely among the great powers in
all of world history, ours (we insist) is an inherently values-based
approach to policy.
Furthermore, we have it on good authority that the ideals we espouse
represent universal truths, valid for all times. American statesmen past
and present have regularly affirmed that judgment. In doing so, they
validate it and render it all but impervious to doubt. Whatever
momentary setbacks the United States might encounter, whether a
generation ago in Vietnam or more recently in Iraq, this certainty that
American values are destined to prevail imbues U.S. policy with a
distinctive grandeur. The preferred language of American statecraft is
bold, ambitious, and confident.
Reflecting such convictions, policymakers in Washington nurse (and the
majority of citizens tacitly endorse) ever more grandiose expectations
for how armed might can facilitate the inevitable triumph of those
values. In that regard, George W Bush's vow that the United States will
"rid the world of evil" both echoes and amplifies the large claims of
his predecessors going at least as far back as Woodrow Wilson.3 Coming
from Bush the warrior-president, the promise to make an end to evil is a
promise to destroy, to demolish, and to obliterate it.
One result of this belief that the fulfillment of America's historic
mission begins with America's destruction of the old order has been to
revive a phenomenon that C. Wright Mills in the early days of the Cold
War described as a "military metaphysics"—a tendency to see
international problems as military problems and to discount the
likelihood of finding a solution except through military means.4
To state the matter bluntly, Americans in our own time have fallen prey
to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a
tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national
greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To
a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to
define the nation's strength and well-being in terms of military
preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for)
military ideals.5

___________________________________

1. Gregg Easterbrook, "Out on the Edge: American Power Moves Beyond the
Mere Super," New York Times, April 27, 2003.
2. Max Boot, "The New American Way of War," Foreign Affairs 82
(July/August 2003), p. 44.
3. Bush remarks at the National Cathedral, September 14, 2001.
4. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, 1956, rpt. 2000), p. 222.
5. The Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 6, p. 438, provides the following
four-part definition of militarism: "The spirit and tendencies of the
professional soldier; the prevalence of military sentiments or ideals
among a people; the political condition characterized by the
predominance of the military class in government or administration; the
tendency to regard military efficiency as the paramount interest of the
state." The new American militarism conforms to the latter three
elements of this definition, with the caveat that the present-day
"military class** in Washington is comprised chiefly of people who are
not themselves serving soldiers. They are instead politicians, civil
servants, journalists, and hangers-on who are fully imbued with a
militaristic mindset and worldview. The definition offered by The New
Oxford Dictionary of English, p. 1173, "the belief or desire of a
government or people that a country should maintain a strong military
capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote
national interests," also applies, but it fails to consider the
importance of military values, which also form an element of the new
American militarism.

~ from "The New American Militarism, How Americans are Seduced by War"
by Andrew J. Bacevich

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