The Libby lobby's pardon campaign

Unintentionally and foolishly, Wolfowitz has hanged the guilty man again. Wolfowitz's defense of Libby is composed with the same care and skill that Wolfowitz brought to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, creating the opposite effects of what he desired. In this bizarre disclosure, rather than exculpating Libby, Wolfowitz incriminates him; for this story is damning evidence of Libby's state of mind -- that he knew he was engaged in wrongdoing in leaking the identity of a CIA covert operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, to two reporters, Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time magazine, and in vouchsafing it to White House press secretary Ari Fleischer for the purpose of his leaking it to the press, which he promptly did.

In their filings and sentence pleading, Libby's lawyers argued repeatedly that he did not know that Plame was covert, that he did not "knowingly disclose classified material," and, as his lead attorney, Ted Wells, told the jury in his closing statement, that Libby acted in "good faith," always believing that he was operating within the law. On Oct. 30, 2006, his lawyers filed a claim denying that "any damage to the national security, the CIA, or Ms. Wilson herself was, or could have been, caused by the disclosure of that status."

Once again, Wolfowitz has blundered. Just as he has undone himself at the World Bank, this time he has inadvertently exposed Libby's "good faith" for bad faith. Indeed, the Wolfowitz letter shows that Libby knew the consequences of revealing the "status" of a CIA operative. As evidence introduced in the CIA leak case proved, Cheney had confided the secret to him and ordered him to spread it. But Libby has never mentioned the previous incident of apparently trying to protect a covert CIA operative. If Wolfowitz remembers the story, and it's credible, so Libby must recall it too. Therefore, he must also have known that his defense was based on false premises contrary to what he understood to be right and how he had acted in the past. He sent his attorneys to court to make a case he consciously knew was wrong from his own prior experience of having protected a national security asset from exposure. One can only wonder if Libby ever told his lawyers the story that Wolfowitz has recounted or whether he misled them, too.

The sentencing letters in support of Libby are a treasure trove of ironies and hypocrisies, pointing to the past actions of the epistolary authors or Libby. Seeking to arouse sympathy for his former disciple, Wolfowitz writes, "Harriet and Scooter Libby are both deeply loving parents and the suffering of their children has been a torture for them both." The word "torture" is an especially artless choice. Libby, in fact, was instrumental in Bush's torture policy, even browbeating and isolating administration officials who raised questions about it, as one of them who was subject to Libby's scorn told me.

Yet Douglas Feith, a former undersecretary of defense, wrote in a letter, "Scooter showed an admirable concern for preserving civil liberties." In the Pentagon, Feith oversaw the Office of Special Plans, constructed as a parallel intelligence operation apart from the regular channels to give a stamp of approval to what turned out uniformly to be disinformation about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and supposed links to terrorism. These falsehoods, collected almost exclusively from the neoconservatives' favorite Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, were siphoned from the OSP to the OVP (Office of the Vice President), where Libby was in charge of packaging them. Libby and Cheney appeared at CIA headquarters numerous times, occasions on which Libby forced analysts to respond to his relentless interrogatories in order to get them to give their stamp of authority that the information was true. Within the CIA, the analysts even began to prepare for these visits with "murder boards," according to former CIA director George Tenet's memoir, "At the Center of the Storm." He quotes a senior analyst: "Were they trying to push us and drive us? Absolutely." Secretary of State Colin Powell rejected "one of Libby's lengthy briefs out of hand as a basis for his Feb. 5, 2003, speech before the United Nations Security Council on Saddam's WMD and al-Qaida connections, but nonetheless still delivered a speech replete with disinformation. (Powell and Tenet were not among those who wrote letters on Libby's behalf.)

Another letter writer, John Bolton, defended Libby's perjury merely as a lapse of "perfect recall." He also offered opinions on the handling of intelligence. "With classified information, it was frequently hard to know who was cleared to see what or what could be discussed with whom. If there is anyone who fully understands our 'system' for protecting classified information, I have yet to meet him." Bolton, the former U.N. ambassador and undersecretary of state for arms control, was Cheney and Libby's ally within the State Department, blocking and spying on Powell. Bolton gamed the "system" to keep information from Powell, sought to intimidate State Department Intelligence and Research Bureau analysts into accepting his skewed views, and tried to reassign them when they did not bend. Libby, for his part, was also crucial in blackballing Foreign Service officers, experienced in nation building, who were involved in Powell's elaborate "Future of Iraq" project.

Kenneth Adelman, a neoconservative former member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, who had declared that the war in Iraq would be a "cakewalk," wrote a letter for Libby, too. "Your Honor," he wrote, "this is punishment enough. Hence I ask that this decent man not be subjected to time in jail, and allowed to cope with his conviction as best as anyone could in these circumstances. After all, Scooter Libby is a good person."

A neoconservative is a Bush administration official who has mugged reality and claims he's the victim. Neoconservatism has now been reduced to a clemency plea.

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