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Hard to believe that Cheney did not know
By Michael Gawenda
10/31/05 "SMH" -- -- Some White House officials may believe they
dodged a bullet when the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald
announced after a two-year investigation that only Lewis "Scooter"
Libby faced criminal charges in the CIA leak affair.
After all, Karl Rove, though still under investigation, seems likely
to escape indictment and Fitzgerald did not find that any
Administration official had broken the law by leaking the identity
of a CIA agent to journalists - the trigger for his two-year
investigation.
While the charges against Libby are serious, they "only" involve
allegations that he lied to FBI investigators and to the grand jury
about how he learned the identity of Valerie Plame, wife of the
former ambassador Joe Wilson, who was a trenchant critic of the
Administration's decision to go to war in Iraq.
But if these White House officials believe the CIA leak fallout will
be restricted to the destruction of the career of a key aide of the
Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and a close adviser to President George
Bush in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, they are kidding themselves.
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AdvertisementWhether or not Libby does a deal with prosecutors to
avoid a trial - and there is no evidence that he is considering such
a deal - it stretches credulity to believe his attempts to discredit
Wilson by leaking the identity of Wilson's wife to journalists was
done without Cheney's knowledge.
Reading the lengthy Fitzgerald indictment leaves no doubt that there
was a concerted effort in Cheney's office to rebut Wilson's claim
that the Administration had gone to war in Iraq on intelligence it
knew to be false.
Is it really possible this effort was made without Cheney knowing
anything? Cheney and Libby were incredibly close, joint partners in
building the case for war, especially the case that Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction represented a direct threat to US
security.
Wilson's claim had to be rebutted and in the way politics is played
these days in the US and elsewhere, he had to be discredited. If
that meant leaking to journalists that Wilson was married to a CIA
agent who recommended him for a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger to check
out claims that Saddam was buying uranium for his weapons program,
so be it.
It is now clear that whatever happened in his discussions with
journalists, Libby learnt of Plame's identity from Cheney, who had
learnt it from the CIA director, George Tenet. So what are the
chances that Cheney did not know what Libby was doing?
The issue is not whether Wilson was truthful about his findings
after his trip to Niger, but the extent of Cheney's involvement in
the efforts to discredit him. There is no suggestion Cheney
committed a crime, but the political risks to him of a Libby trial
are enormous, potentially politically fatal and deeply damaging to
Bush.
What's more, when the war in Iraq is increasing unpopular, and with
more than 2000 Americans dead and more than 15,000 wounded, the
question of how Cheney's office used intelligence to justify the war
will inevitably be part of the Libby trial.
If Libby lied about how he discovered Plame's identity - he claims
he heard it from journalists and had forgotten Cheney had told him -
why would he tell such clumsy fibs? The only rational explanation is
he was protecting his boss.
For journalists and the media in general, the affair raises
troubling issues. Journalists who spoke to Libby on a confidential
basis will be the main witnesses - apart from Cheney - at Libby's
trial.
Their testimony before the grand jury built Fitzgerald's case
against Libby. The three journalists who testified dispute his claim
he told them he heard Plame rumours from other journalists but was
not sure they were true.
So at least three journalists, under threat of being jailed, have
been forced to betray a source, and may have to help send a source
to jail for many years.
The CIA case is far from over, not for the White House and not for
journalists or journalism.
Copyright © 2005. The Sydney Morning Herald.
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