The Cost of Libby's Obstruction of Justice

Lest we forget, the death of Captain America wasn't the only thing in the news last week. There was also the Scooter Libby verdict, the implications of which echo through much of what passes for the Bush foreign policy. And that's where Frank Rich is going in his column this week, "Why Libby's Pardon Is a Slam Dunk." He could've come up with a better title, if you ask me. It's obvious why--it would go against the Prez's very nature not to. But Rich also suggests that Libby has a lot of secrets he could share with the special counsel were he to choose to do so. Precisely what are those little secrets? Rich provides some broad strokes to show how Libby's little perjury and obstruction of justice protects the Bush agenda.

[Libby] 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.

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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.

Keeping those casualties out of view, of course, returns us to the scandals involving the squalor at Walter Reed and, it's beginning to appear, the substandard treatment for Iraqi vets throughout the military hospital system. The White House still seems oblivious to all this, however. Perhaps they're still scoffing at the rest of us and our reality-based views.

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.

It's worth noting in all this that, although Libby was found guilty of his crimes, justice remains obstructed. We don't know exactly what happened in the Joseph Wilson case and precisely who was involved (although we've got some extremely good guesses). Were there other crimes committed? At this point, we might assume, but we can't know.

As for Rich's title, we'll have to see precisely how it plays out. The Prez has said that he's not going to interfere in an ongoing legal situation (and why should he jump in to pardon Libby as long as there's an outside chance some court of appeals might do that work for him?). No, unless his hand is forced and Libby might do some actual jail time, he'll wait the twenty-two months until his term is just about over.