Scooter, you're doin' heckuva job

Note: My Media Ethics students asked me to contribute an op-ed to the campus newspaper, and this is what I came up with:

Truth Decay: drilling into the CIA leak investigation

After a two year grand jury probe over who leaked a covert CIA operative’s identity to the press, Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has indicted I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff. In a dramatic press conference Friday October 28, Fitzgerald charged Libby with perjury, issuing false statements, and obstruction of justice. Karl Rove, top political advisor to President Bush and mastermind of Bush’s ascent to power, is also a target of the investigation and may face indictment.

The story has set Washington a-buzz, but does this have anything to with the rest of the country? Some background might help explain why the answer is yes.

In 2002, the Bush administration was revving-up a public relations juggernaut to rally support for regime change in Iraq. The most compelling rationale for war was the claim that Iraq had been developing weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons). Vice President Dick Cheney, the cheerleader-in-chief of the effort, and other prominent administration officials repeatedly insinuated that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium (a necessary ingredient for nuclear bombs) from the African nation Niger. The allegation resurfaced in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech. Iraq had also obtained aluminum tubes, which could be used as centrifuges in building nuclear bombs. Another suggestion was that the UN inspections process wasn’t working. In short, the argument went, Iraq was an imminent threat to the Middle East and the United States itself. A preemptive war was needed before we saw the “smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud.”

There was a slight problem with these assertions. Most of them weren’t true. Some were badly distorted. The administration based its allegations on forged documents, murky intelligence, and a willful blindness and deafness to dissenting opinions (e.g. elements in the CIA, the UN inspectors, “old Europe”). The Bush administration was dead-set on going to war, facts be damned. To quote a British government account (the infamous “Downing Street Memo”): “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC [National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” And so the president got the war he wanted so dearly. In the spring of 2003, the United States invaded and occupied Iraq. The rest, as they say, is history.

This is where the CIA leak investigation comes in. In the early months after the invasion, some questions began to nag the administration. Where were the weapons of mass destruction? How could our intelligence be so wrong? By July 2003, former ambassador Joseph Wilson went public with an op-ed piece in the New York Times declaring that the CIA had sent him on a mission to Niger to check out the story that Iraq had been seeking to purchase uranium. Wilson found there was nothing to the claim and reported as much to the CIA. Apparently, the White House never got the memo, or never read it.

Politically, this was a direct challenge to the Bush administration’s central claim that Iraq posed an imminent danger to national security. White House officials immediately spun into hardball mode. Sources inside the White House started talking to reporters on background, whispering that nobody knew much about Joe Wilson, and besides, his wife Valerie Plame, who worked at the CIA, played a role in getting him sent to Niger. Shortly after that, conservative columnist Bob Novak “outed” Valerie Plame in a newspaper column, blowing her cover. The CIA was not happy. Blowing an agent’s secret cover is not a nice thing to do and puts operations and people at risk.

A federal investigation of the leak followed, which brings us to the present. We now know that Scooter Libby, Karl Rove and others allegedly knew a lot more about Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame than they originally let on.

Fitzgerald’s indictment of Libby establishes that Libby knew in May 2003 that Joe Wilson was sent to Africa. By the middle of June, Libby also knew that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and had some involvement in planning her husband’s trip. Libby was directly involved in meetings discussing how to handle press reports concerning the matter, and as early as June 23, 2003, he was talking with New York Times reporter Judy Miller about Wilson and his wife. On July 7, Libby told the White House press secretary that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA.

But when Libby was questioned by the FBI, he told them he had first heard that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA from reporters and that he never discussed Wilson’s wife with Judy Miller. In layman’s terms, this is called lying.

When under oath to the grand jury, Libby repeated his lie about learning of Wilson’s identity from reporters, and that he couldn’t recall having heard of Wilson’s wife before talking with reporters. According to the indictment, these misleading and false statements impeded the investigation’s ability to determine the truth. In legal terminology, this is obstruction of justice.
Libby promptly resigned his White House post upon being indicted, and it is unclear at the time I am writing whether “Bush’s brain” Karl Rove will be indicted as well. Apparently, the White House hasn’t been entirely truthful in dealing with this matter.

The Libby indictment exposes how those in power tend to operate; thinking themselves above the law, they see the truth as something malleable, something to be managed through tight message control.

But the truth is real. It has real consequenes. Over 2000 American soldiers have lost their lives in war based on questionable premises. Over 14,000 troops have suffered debilitating injuries. These are facts that can’t be wished or photo-opped away.

If you really value the truth, if you think that wars should be based on facts not wishful thinking, if you think that political criticism should be countered through evidence and reasoning not through ruinous smear tactics, then you ought to be watching this case carefully, because nothing will stop the powerful from distorting the facts to suit their ambitions, until the people hold them accountable.