Topic: Decline of the West
A recent book by former New York Times reporter Judith Miller lays bare one of the most egregious scandals of the Bush Administration—and no one’s paying attention.
The Story: A Reporter’s Journey recounts Miller’s part in the Valerie Plame affair, a cause célèbre that led to the prosecution and conviction of Lawrence “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby was supposedly the man who “outed” Plame, a covert CIA agent, after her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times alleging that the Bush Administration had lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
When the Plame affair went public the Bush Administration decided to hand the case over to a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. This turned out to be a bad move. Fitzgerald proved to be a zealot and he became fixated on collecting the scalp of Vice President Cheney. In order to do so he put the squeeze on Libby, obviously hoping to elicit testimony that would enable him to bag Cheney.
There was just one problem: Neither Libby nor Cheney had “outed” Valerie Plame. The culprit was one Richard Armitage, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief deputy, who leaked Plame’s identity to the late Robert Novak. He’d admitted as much to the FBI before Fitzgerald was ever appointed. Moreover, the special prosecutor became aware of all this at a very early stage of his own investigation. Nonetheless Fitzgerald passed over Armitage and fingered Libby, alleging that he’d leaked Plame’s name to Miller.
Libby was eventually convicted of lying to the FBI, and it was Miller’s testimony that sank him. But now she says that the special prosecutor deliberately withheld crucial evidence from both her and the defense, evidence that would have blown up his case. Virtually everything that Fitzgerald alleged about Libby was false. In short, the prosecution and conviction of Scooter Libby was a gross miscarriage of justice resulting from a glaring act of prosecutorial misconduct.
Scarcely less gross was the false narrative—Bush lied, people died—that evolved out of the Plame affair. Relying on the story told by Joe Wilson—that on an investigative trip to Niger at the behest of Cheney he found no evidence that Saddamite Iraq was trying to obtain yellowcake uranium—Bush Administration critics and many in the media charged that the President and his close advisers knew there were no WMD in Iraq but elected to go to war anyway. But Wilson had not been sent to Niger at Cheney’s behest. The person who suggested him for the assignment was Valerie Plame—his wife. Nor did he return from his junket with conclusive proof of Iraqi innocence. Indeed, the report he wrote for the CIA suggested the opposite. And in fact an Iraqi trade delegation had visited Niger, a country whose sole export is yellowcake.
As for Plame’s “outing” being a heinous crime, it later emerged that dozens if not hundreds of people in Washington knew that she worked for the CIA. Nor was she any longer a covert field agent. In no way, shape or form had the mention of her name in the media threatened Valerie Plame’s safety. Anyhow, we may be fairly certain that the outrage on her behalf was highly selective: Recall how Left has embraced the dubious likes of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and, er, Chelsea Manning.
If anyone deserved to be prosecuted over the Plame affair it was Patrick Fitzgerald, who behaved throughout in an unethical, illegal and dishonorable manner. Scarcely less dishonorable was the silence of Richard Armitage and his boss, Colin Powell. Though aware that Libby was innocent they kept their mouths shut and left him to twist slowly, slowly in the wind. That a man like Powell, admired for his probity, enabled the railroading of Scooter Libby is one of the most shocking aspects of this scandal. Since, though, it’s a scandal that reflects poorly not on the Bush Administration but on its critics and opponents you won’t find too many Democrats, liberals, progressives, lefties, etc. who care about it.
