Is that all there is? Despite the superheated rhetoric that we’ll read over the next several days, Scooter Libby has been indicted for lying about when and how he learned facts that he had the right to know (as the holder of a high level security clearance) and didn’t illegally disclose. There is no charge that he leaked classified information to anybody or endangered national security in any way. If he really did make false statements to FBI agents and perjure himself before Special Counsel Fitzgerald’s grand jury, he acted foolishly and deserves to be punished, but, on the scale of offenses, this one is pretty trivial. It scarcely ranks with Sandy Berger’s lightly punished removal and destruction of secret documents.
Nevertheless, Mr. Fitzgerald presumably believes that the matter is serious enough to go to trial, and his judgement isn’t to be scoffed at. Whether it is correct is the concern of Mr. Libby and his lawyers. As for the rest of us, I see no reason to bewail this development. It is an opportunity to drive home substantive historical points, in particular, that Joseph Wilson lied grotesquely when he claimed to reporters and in his famous New York Times op-ed that his mission to Niger discredited reports that Ba’athist Iraq had sought to buy uranium from that country. What’s more, the CIA knew that he was lying and made no attempt to correct the record. Instead, it claimed – with no basis, it now appears – that Wilson’s wife’s role with the CIA had been illegally revealed, referred that dubious accusation to the Justice Department and leaked the referral, which was supposed to be classified, to the news media (the one clear instance of law breaking in this whole affair). It’s hard to read that pattern of events as anything other than evidence that persons within the CIA were eager to influence American public opinion by enhancing the credibility of spurious charges against the Bush Administration and by manufacturing a political crisis.
Now that the Libby prosecution lends current interest to this history, it’s time to think hard about concepts like the relative roles of elected and career officials in our system of government. Liberals were outraged in the 1970’s by what they characterized as a rogue CIA that carried out a foreign policy of its own. Did their outrage stem from the agency’s mutiny against democratic authority or merely from the fact that its policies were adverse to communist interests? Are today’s rogues all right, because they bend their efforts to undermining a Republican Presidency and its campaigns against our country’s declared enemies?
Just to be completely clear: This is not a case of brave whistle blowers bringing to light truths that elected officials want to keep under wraps. Wilson and his abettors spread lies, and they worked to enlist the law enforcement process in a vendetta against high government officials who tried to correct their disinformation. Their conspiracy may have snared one incautious victim. It will be a sad day for America if it enjoys more success than that.
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