Why Libby’s Pardon Is a Slam Dunk
By FRANK RICH
03/11/07 "New
York Times" -- -- EVEN by Washington’s standards,
few debates have been more fatuous or wasted more energy than
the frenzied speculation over whether President Bush will or
will not pardon Scooter Libby. Of course he will.
A president who tries to void laws he doesn’t like by
encumbering them with “signing statements” and who regards the
Geneva Conventions as a nonbinding technicality isn’t going to
start playing by the rules now. His assertion last week that he
is “pretty much going to stay out of” the Libby case is as
credible as his pre-election vote of confidence in Donald
Rumsfeld. The only real question about the pardon is whether Mr.
Bush cares enough about his fellow Republicans’ political
fortunes to delay it until after Election Day 2008.
Either way, the pardon is a must for Mr. Bush. He needs Mr.
Libby to keep his mouth shut. Cheney’s Cheney knows too much
about covert administration schemes far darker than the smearing
of Joseph Wilson. Though Mr. Libby wrote a novel that sank
without a trace a decade ago, he now has the makings of an
explosive Washington tell-all that could be stranger than most
fiction and far more salable.
Mr. Libby’s novel was called “The Apprentice.” His memoir could
be titled “The Accomplice.” Its first chapter would open in
August 2002, when he and a small cadre of administration
officials including Karl Rove formed the White House Iraq Group
(WHIG), a secret task force to sell the Iraq war to the American
people. The climactic chapter of the Libby saga unfolded last
week when the guilty verdict in his trial coincided, all too
fittingly, with the Congressional appearance of two Iraq
veterans, one without an ear and one without an eye, to recount
their subhuman treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
It was WHIG’s secret machinations more than four years ago that
led directly to those shredded lives. WHIG had been tasked, as
The Washington Post would later uncover, to portray Iraq’s
supposedly imminent threat to America with “gripping images and
stories not available in the hedged and austere language of
intelligence.” In other words, WHIG was to cook up the sexiest
recipe for promoting the war, facts be damned. So it did, by
hyping the scariest possible scenario: nuclear apocalypse. As
Michael Isikoff and David Corn report in “Hubris,” it was WHIG
(equipped with the slick phrase-making of the White House
speechwriter Michael Gerson) that gave the administration its
Orwellian bumper sticker, the constantly reiterated warning that
Saddam’s “smoking gun” could be “a mushroom cloud.”
Ever since all the W.M.D. claims proved false, the
administration has pleaded that it was duped by the same bad
intelligence everyone else saw. But the nuclear card, the most
persistent and gripping weapon in the prewar propaganda arsenal,
was this White House’s own special contrivance. Mr. Libby was
present at its creation. He knows what Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney
knew about the manufacture of this fiction and when they knew
it.
Clearly they knew it early on. The administration’s guilt (or at
least embarrassment) about its lies in fomenting the war quickly
drove it to hide the human price being paid for those lies. (It
also tried to hide the financial cost of the war by keeping it
out of the regular defense budget, but that’s another, if
related, story.) The steps the White House took to keep
casualties out of view were extraordinary, even as it deployed
troops to decorate every presidential victory rally and gave the
Pentagon free rein to exploit the sacrifices of Jessica Lynch
and Pat Tillman in mendacious P.R. stunts.
The administration’s enforcement of a prohibition on photographs
of coffins returning from Iraq was the first policy
manifestation of the hide-the-carnage strategy. It was
complemented by the president’s decision to break with
precedent, set by Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter among others,
and refuse to attend military funerals, lest he lend them a
media spotlight. But Mark Benjamin, who has chronicled the
mistreatment of Iraq war veterans since 2003, discovered an
equally concerted effort to keep injured troops off camera. Mr.
Benjamin wrote in Salon in 2005 that “flights carrying the
wounded arrive in the United States only at night” and that both
Walter Reed and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda
barred the press “from seeing or photographing incoming
patients.”
A particularly vivid example of the extreme measures taken by
the White House to cover up the war’s devastation turned up in
The Washington Post’s Walter Reed exposé. Sgt. David Thomas, a
Tennessee National Guard gunner with a Purple Heart and an
amputated leg, found himself left off the guest list for a
summer presidential ceremony honoring a fellow amputee after he
said he would be wearing shorts, not pants, when occupying a
front-row seat in camera range. Now we can fully appreciate that
bizarre incident on C-Span in October 2003, when an anguished
Cher, of all unlikely callers, phoned in to ask why
administration officials, from the president down, were not
being photographed with patients like those she had visited at
Walter Reed. “I don’t understand why these guys are so hidden,”
she said.
The answer is simple: Out of sight, out of mind was the game
plan, and it has been enforced down to the tiniest instances.
When HBO produced an acclaimed (and apolitical) documentary last
year about military medics’ remarkable efforts to save lives in
Iraq, “Baghdad ER,” Army brass at the last minute boycotted
planned promotional screenings in Washington and at Fort
Campbell, Ky. In a memo, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley warned that the
film, though made with Army cooperation, could endanger
veterans’ health by provoking symptoms of post-traumatic stress
disorder.
The General Kiley who was so busy policing an HBO movie for its
potential health hazards is the same one who did not correct the
horrific real-life conditions on his watch at Walter Reed. After
the Post exposé was published, he tried to spin it by boasting
that most of the medical center’s rooms “were actually perfectly
O.K.” and scapegoating “soldiers leaving food in their rooms”
for the mice and cockroach infestations. That this guy is still
surgeon general of the Army — or was as of Friday — makes you
wonder what he, like Mr. Libby, has on his superiors.
Now that the country has seen the Congressional testimony of
Specialist Jeremy Duncan, who has melted flesh where his ear
once was, or watched the ABC newsman Bob Woodruff’s report on
other neglected patients in military medical facilities far
beyond Walter Reed, the White House cover-up of veterans’ care
has collapsed, like so many other cover-ups necessitated by its
conduct of this war. But the administration and its surrogates
still won’t face up to their moral culpability.
Mary Matalin, the former Cheney flack who served with Mr. Libby
on WHIG and is now on the board of his legal defense fund (its
full list of donors is unknown), has been especially vocal.
“Scooter didn’t do anything,” she said. “And his personal record
and service are impeccable.” What Mr. Libby did — fabricating
nuclear threats at WHIG and then lying under oath when he feared
that sordid Pandora’s box might be pried open by the Wilson case
— was despicable. Had there been no WHIG or other White House
operation for drumming up fictional rationales for war, there
would have been no bogus uranium from Africa in a presidential
speech, no leak to commit perjury about, no amputees to shut
away in filthy rooms at Walter Reed.
Listening to Ms. Matalin and her fellow apparatchiks emote
publicly about the punishment being inflicted on poor Mr. Libby
and his family, you wonder what world they live in. They seem
clueless about how ugly their sympathy for a conniving courtier
sounds against the testimony of those wounded troops and their
families who bear the most searing burdens of the unnecessary
war WHIG sped to market.
As is often noted, any parallels between Iraq and Vietnam do not
extend to America’s treatment of its troops. No one spits at
those serving in Iraq. But our “support” for the troops has
often been as hypocritical as that of an administration that
still fails to provide them with sufficient armor. Health care
indignities, among other betrayals of returning veterans, have
been reported by countless news organizations since the war
began, not just this year. Many in Congress did nothing, and we
as a people have often looked the other way, supporting the
troops with car decals and donated phone cards while the same
history repeats itself again and again.
Now the “surge” that was supposed to show results by summer is
creeping inexorably into an open-ended escalation, even as
Moktada al-Sadr’s militia ominously melts away, just as Iraq’s
army did after the invasion in 2003, lying in wait to spring a
Tet-like surprise. And still, despite Thursday’s breakthrough
announcement of a credible Iraq exit blueprint by the House
leadership, Congress threatens to dither. While Mr. Bush will no
doubt pardon Scooter Libby without so much as a second thought,
anyone else in Washington who continues to further this debacle
may find it less easy to escape scot-free.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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