Saga of Washington's discredited WMD claims leads to the conviction for perjury of Dick Cheney's key aide
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 07 March 2007
In a massive new blow to the credibility of the White House, Vice-President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff Lewis Libby has been convicted of obstruction of justice, perjury and lying to the FBI, during the investigation into the leaking of the identity of a CIA agent.
After a seven-week trial, the jury found Libby guilty yesterday on four of the five counts against him. Ever calm in court, Libby merely blinked as the verdict was read out. Defence lawyers immediately said they would seek a fresh trial, and if that failed, lodge an appeal. In theory Libby faces up to 25 years in jail, though federal sentencing guidelines mean he is likely to receive a far shorter term.
The case arose from the investigation into the leak in July 2003 of the name of Valerie Plame, the CIA agent whose husband, the former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been a virulent critic of the Iraq war. Ms Plame's identity was revealed a few days after Mr Wilson had written a New York Times column debunking White House claims that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium in Africa, and accusing the Bush administration of deliberately manipulating pre-war intelligence. Libby was not accused of leaking the name deliberately, which is a criminal offence. His crime was to lie to the FBI and the grand jury investigating the case, by maintaining he only learnt who Ms Plame was from a reporter, two days before her name appeared in print.
But some of the most celebrated journalists in Washington went into the witness box to testify they had been told by Libby in person that Mr Wilson's wife worked for the CIA - in one case three weeks before Libby said he became aware of the fact.
Defence lawyers contended that if he made a mistake, it was simply because of a faulty memory caused by pressure of work. But the jury decided that Libby had directly lied. The motive, one juror explained to reporters afterwards, was to cover up the involvement of the Vice-President himself in the campaign to discredit the former ambassador.
In a statement, Mr Cheney said he was "very disappointed with the verdict". At the White House the mood was equally grim. George Bush respected the result of the trial, but was "saddened for Scooter Libby and his family", a spokesman said.
But there is no concealing the extent of the damage. Libby is not only the most senior Bush administration official to face - and now be convicted of - criminal charges. As chief of staff to arguably the most powerful vice-president in US history, he was one of the two or three most important policy-makers at the White House after the President and Vice-President.
The trial, in which neither Libby nor his former boss testified, threw no new light on the handling of the WMD intelligence used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But it revealed the obsessive sensitivity of the Vice-President's office to any attack on its pre-war use of intelligence, and its determination to discredit critics.
At one point the prosecution produced a specimen of the offending article, annotated by Mr Cheney himself, asking who Mr Wilson was, and whether he had been sent on his 2002 fact-finding mission to Africa as a "junket" organised by his wife. The guilty verdict against Libby is thus bound to tarnish further the reputation of both Mr Bush and Mr Cheney, whose approval ratings are even lower than those of the President.
Libby, said Denis Collins, one of the 11 jurors, seemed to be the "fall guy" who had been given the job of talking to reporters by the Vice-President. There was "a tremendous amount of sympathy" for him, Mr Collins said, but in the end they could not believe that a man whose exceptional grasp of detail had been attested to in court had simply forgotten when and with whom he had discussed Ms Plame.
The chief prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald denied suggestions that he had made more of the affair than it merited. Mr Fitzgerald was named special prosecutor in November 2003, after the Justice Department opened an investigation into the leak.
"We could not walk away from the facts of the case that we knew in December 2003. Any lie under oath is serious," he said.
Libby's appeal could run for many months through the courts, possibly as far as the Supreme Court.
If the case is not settled by the time a new president is elected in November 2008, Mr Bush could pardon Libby.
But Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, flatly opposed any pardon, saying: "It's about time someone in the Bush administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics."
The fallen war advocate
Until October 2005, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was the chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney and a powerful influence within the White House, particularly on matters of national security. He was among the loudest voices making the case for war with Iraq and helped put together the dossier that Secretary of State Colin Powell notoriously revealed to the United Nations in the spring of 2003.
A former private lawyer, Libby joined the government in the early 80s, joining the State Department where he served under his former law professor Paul Wolfowitz. After a brief departure from government to return to public practice, Libby returned to work for Mr Wolfowitz at the Pentagon in 1989.
He was also a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, a right-wing group seeking the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
When he became Mr Cheney's chief of staff he received the name "germ boy", so named because of his insistence on universal smallpox vaccination.
But his closeness to the Vice-President also earned him the title "Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney".
In 1996 Libby published a novel, The Apprentice, that told the story of a group of travellers stranded in northern Japan in 1903. The publishers described it as "an everyday tale of bestiality and paedophilia in 1903 Japan... [and] packed with sexual perversion, dwelling on prepubescent girls and their training as prostitutes".
Andrew Buncombe
A LIAR IN THE WHITE HOUSE
The Lie
The Blair Government's September 2002 dossier claims Saddam Hussein has sought to buy uranium for his nuclear weapons programme from Niger. George Bush, in his State of the Union address in January 2003, ignores CIA reservations and repeats the assertion. The claim becomes a central plank in the argument for war.
The Doubts
The CIA dispatches a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, to investigate the Niger claims, which he concludes are false. Related documents are subsequently obtained by Italian authorities and passed to the UN nuclear agency which declares them to be crude forgeries in March 2003, just before the invasion.
The Whistle-Blower
When no WMD are found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, Joseph Wilson accuses the Bush administration of deliberately manipulating intelligence before the war. His views are first aired in an off-the-record interview with The Independent on Sunday in June of that year, before he goes public in American newspapers.
The Smear Campaign
Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson's wife, is identified as an undercover agent by columnist Robert Novak on 14 July 2003 and the search is on for the source of the leak within the Bush administration, accused of deliberately smearing Ms Plame while potentially endangering her life by exposing her as a CIA agent. Revealing a CIA agent's identity is against the law.
The Cover-up
A special prosecutor is appointed to uncover the leaker, with suspicion falling on the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, whose chief of staff, Lewis Libby, takes pains to protect his boss. Although no charges are brought over the leak itself, Mr Libby is put on trial for trying to frustrate the investigation.
The Conviction
Lewis Libby becomes the first Bush administration official to be convicted over the flawed intelligence used to justify the war when he is found guilty yesterday of obstructing justice, lying and perjury. He faces up to 25 years in jail. Many in Washington say it was, in effect, the trial of Mr Cheney, who was responsible for the actions of his aide.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
