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Indicting America
By Scott Ritter
10/29/05 "ICH
" -- -- New York -- The indictment of I. Lewis
"Scooter" Libby by Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald provides
the most cogent and visible evidence to date of the criminal mindset
that exists inside the Bush administration regarding the decision to
invade Iraq.
The indictment is linked to Libby's involvement in illegally
revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in
violation of U.S. law, and the resultant conspiracy to deny and
cover up the fact that this crime had in fact taken place. But the
real crime committed here is the deception leading to war carried
out by the Bush administration, in particular the activities of the
vice president, Dick Cheney, and his chief of staff, "Scooter"
Libby, which is why they felt they needed to go after former
Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Plame.
The outing of Plame was just the tip of this criminal enterprise.
The specific charge - making false statements to a grand jury - is
in fact the best indicator of the true nature of the crimes
committed by Libby and, by extension, the Bush administration.
Acting at the behest of the vice president, Libby was a key figure
behind inserting dubious and unverified intelligence data alleging
the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction into the public
arena, either by leaking this information to reporters such as The
New York Times' Judith Miller, or by having it referenced in
high-profile speeches such as the president's 2003 State of the
Union Address or Colin Powell's now-infamous presentation to the
Security Council in February 2003.
Cheney and Libby were behind the decision to mislead Congress, in
particular the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's
investigation into the reasons why the U.S. intelligence community
had gotten it so wrong about Iraqi WMD capabilities. (Contrary to
the much-hyped case made by the Bush administration in justifying
the decision to invade Iraq, no WMD were found in Iraq, and the CIA
subsequently acknowledged that all Iraqi WMD had been destroyed by
the summer of 1991).
To Cheney and Libby, Joseph Wilson had committed the ultimate sin
when he publicly challenged President Bush's case for war with Iraq
by exposing the fraudulent nature of the administration's very
public claims that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium
"yellowcake" from Niger.
If true, the "yellowcake" story would have bolstered the president
and vice president's assertions that Iraq had resurrected its
nuclear weapons program, thus legitimizing the case for war. But the
reality is that the "yellowcake" claim, like all of the Cheney- and
Libby-peddled intelligence, was specious, in this case derived from
forged documents.
Wilson's exposure of this fraud was seen not only as an act of
betrayal, but also rightly recognized as a threat to the entire
charade that was the Bush administration's fabricated case for war.
If left unchallenged, Wilson's claims could have initiated a process
that would have unraveled the entire fabric of deception and lies
woven by Cheney, Libby and the Bush administration about the
non-existent Iraqi WMD threat. As far as Cheney and Libby were
concerned, truth was the enemy, and truth-tellers were to be
attacked and destroyed.
And now the lies have come home to roost. But the indictment of
Libby must not be the final punctuation in this tragic tale of lies
and deception. Instead, it should serve as a much-needed boost for
Congress, the media and ultimately the American people to carry out
a massive re-examination of the totality of the processes that took
place in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
The lies of Cheney, Libby and the Bush administration regarding
Iraqi WMD did not take place in a vacuum. Congressional checks and
balances, especially in the form of relevant oversight committees,
were non-existent; the few hearings held served as little more than
sham hearings designed to amplify a case for war that was accepted
at face value, without question, despite the fact that all involved
knew the supporting evidence was either non-existent or paper-thin.
The fourth estate was likewise reduced to little more than a
propagandistic extension of the White House and Pentagon, losing any
claim to journalistic integrity through its slavish parroting,
without question, of anything that painted Saddam Hussein's regime
in a negative light, especially when it came to the issue of
retained WMD. At the receiving end of this tangled web of lies and
incompetence are the American people. Having been duped into a war
that has to date cost the lives of over 2,000 members of the armed
forces (not to mention hundreds of our coalition partners and tens
of thousands of Iraqis), the question now is how the citizenry of
the world's most powerful representative democracy will respond.
Void of a major backlash on the part of the American people in
response to the deliberate falsification and deceit that has
transpired regarding Iraq and the now-debunked case for war, the
Libby indictment may prove to be little more than an exercise in
damage control.
Already senior Republican officials, such as Texas Sen. Kay Bailey
Hutchinson, are calling the Libby indictment a mere "technicality."
Right-wing pundits refer to the indictment as the "criminalization
of politics," as if lying one's way into an illegal war of
aggression is somehow akin to politics as usual.
If the American people go along with such blatant attempts at
obscuring the reality of the criminal conspiracy that has been
committed, then it is perhaps time we finally lay to rest this
experiment we call American democracy. At the very minimum, Congress
should be compelled into action. The Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, and in particular its two senior senators, Pat
Robertson, R-Kan., and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va, should not only
complete their investigation into how the Bush administration used
(or misused) intelligence to formulate Iraq policy, but also re-open
its initial report into the so-called "intelligence failure"
regarding the flawed WMD assessments, with the intent to indict any
and all who conspired to keep relevant information from, or made
false statements to, that committee during the conduct of its
original investigation.
There must be a wider investigation into the totality of the
criminal conspiracy undertaken by the Bush administration to defraud
Congress and the American people about the issue of war with Iraq,
and in particular the case used to justify the invasion of that
country. The crime that was committed goes far beyond the outing of
a rogue diplomat's CIA-affiliated spouse, as serious as that charge
may be. The deliberate and systematic manner in which the Bush
administration, from the president on down, peddled misleading,
distorted and fabricated information to Congress and the American
people represents a frontal assault on the very system of government
the United States of America proclaims to champion.
Scott Ritter is a former chief U.N. weapons inspector who
participated in 52 missions in Iraq, 14 of which he led. He is the
author of the newly released "Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of
the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the U.N. and Overthrow
Saddam Hussein" (Nation Books).
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