Libby indicted, wider scandal still out there

Cheney's right hand man Lewis Libby is the sacrificial lamb in the investigation thus far and he immediately quits. Rove wriggled away for the time being, his lawyers submitting a mass of last minute documentation so as to buy more time.

Still, some in the mainstream news are content to treat it more as celebrity gossip about who leaked what to who. So instead let's remind ourselves about the real issue it actually comes down to:


Fabricating intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq

Punishing critics of the policy to use such fabricated intelligence

The Yellowcake forgery earns its rightful place alongside the fabricated dossier cooked up/dug up/sexed up by Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair, the fabricated George Galloway documents implicating him as a recipient of backhanders from Saddam Hussein, and a host of other lies and spin utilized as political weapons and handed to media allies as seen fit. Quite a trend, and no one is likely to forget Dr. Kelly and the ensuing Hutton whitewash of course.

Since 9/11 we have been asked to accept this mystifying, mis-briefed, under-briefed world that the Bushes and Blairs live in. A world in which shadowy hand-picked spin doctors, marionette ministers and 'bungling' intelligence agencies can cocoon elected leaders in weighted agenda, spin and lies, thus enabling earth-shattering radical policy to be deployed unchallenged, whereby, and miraculously, such leaders are always just-sufficiently technically ignorant of the depth of lies to go on relatively unscathed. That this situation is astonishingly twisted, unaccountable, breathtakingly corrupt and exceptionally dangerous still seems to be lost on quite a number of people out there.

Of course you are also invited to accept that when credible insiders with good track records do challenge this and find themselves outed, dead or both, the inevitable whitewash inquiry that follows will be quite enough to settle all your concerns.

"At the crux of the controversy surrounding the disclosure of Plame as a CIA operative is a 2002 trip by her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, to Niger at the behest of the CIA to check out reports that Iraq had sought uranium there for nuclear weapons. He found no substance to the reports, he said, and reported that back to Washington. But in his State of the Union address nearly a year later on Jan. 28, 2003, Bush offered his now-famous 16-word assertion, since retracted, that: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Less than two months later, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, in large part to thwart what he had repeatedly declared was Saddam's intent to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons." (Mercury News)

There is no appetite for yet another false inquiry, another whitewash, another case that doesn't go quite to the root of the matter. Personally, I have no idea what will happen with Libby, or if Rove or others will yet be fingered, but this massive, gaping unresolved scandal that goes right to the hearts of the US and UK government and beyond is one dangerously infected wound which can no longer be treated by having yet another elastoplast stuck over it.

WMD Iraq Libby Plame Niger yellowcake forgery