1 Boring Old Man

Time for a day of Libby’s Grand Jury testimony. It’s easy to get lost in the details of the limited case that’s before the court – that he lied to the Grand Jury, lied to block [obstruct] the truth from being discovered about the outing of Valerie Plame as an undercover C.I.A. Agent. The reason for these limited charges really hinges on a quirk in the law – you can’t out a C.I.A. Agent "knowingly." No one can prove that the culprits "knew" she was undercover. So, we’re left with a much diminished charge – hiding a "dirty trick."

But the trial makes it clear that there was, indeed, a dirty trick. When Joseph Wilson wrote his oped piece concluding that the Administration had manipulated the intelligence to justify their march to war with Iraq, they found out that his wife worked in the C.I.A. Counterproliferation Division, the very group that they had lobbied to find evidence that would justify invading Iraq. I guess they presumed that the C.I.A. was outing them as liars. So they retaliated. Truth was, the C.I.A. wasn’t involved. Joseph Wilson knew that the Administration was lying and he decided to say it out loud – to enter the world of the whistle-blowers all by himself.

And, he was correct. The Bush Administration wanted to invade Iraq. They saw Saddam Hussein as vulnerable, a rogue extraordinaire, and sitting on top of the "oil mine" under the Iraqi desert. So they combed for evidence that he was a nuclear threat to the U.S. and found two shaky pieces of evidence – some Aluminum Tubes they thought might be for Uranium processing, and a forgery that said Hussein was buying Uranium ore. They blew that evidence and a lot of other indirect "hearsay" evidence into a storm – and off we went. I guess they were banking on winning fast, or maybe even finding weapons of mass destruction, and thought we’d just forget how shaky our justification for going to war really was.

So here’s the real charge. George Bush, Dick Cheney, and a number of lesser luminaries got into power and immediately set out to find a way to go to invade Iraq [on a quest for oil]. When Al Qaeda attacked the Twin Trade Towers in New York, they jump-started their Iraq plans by linking Hussein [falsely] to that attack. They added their paltry WMD evidence to the pot and fomented a war. As it became apparent that there were no Al Qaeda ties, no weapons of mass destruction, no quick and easy win, I guess they sort of panicked. So when Joseph Wilson called them on it four months into the war, they way over-reacted and slammed him.

The real crimes? Betrayal; Abuse of power; Arrogance; Greed; Lying; Treason. So, in these silly lies Scooter Libby is telling to the Grand Jury in the tapes today, remember that he was the Chief of Staff for the Vice President of the United States – the Vice President who was the architect of the Iraq Oil War, the Vice President who would be King, the Vice President who is a Traitor.