How Libby became Cheney's pawn

By Sidney Blumenthal

The vice president knew the intelligence for the Iraq war was cooked. So he launched his aide to smear the man who took the information public.

Feb. 1, 2007 | Few issues more agitated and preoccupied Vice President Dick Cheney in the early months after the declaration of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq than former ambassador Joseph Wilson's disclosure that the intelligence underlying the administration's central justification for the invasion was bogus. So far as the occupation of Iraq was concerned, Cheney was in a triumphal mood. In a speech before a conservative group in Washington on July 30, 2003, he repeated his rationales for the war with a sense of finality: "In Iraq, a dictator with a deep and bitter hatred of the United States, who built, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction and cultivated ties to terrorists, is no more."

Behind his serene public face a distressed vice president frantically micromanaged a campaign of press leaks to discredit Wilson. Cheney even scripted talking points to aides about what to tell reporters. And he fretted about what was said on cable TV talk shows like MSNBC's "Hardball." His chief agent in this intense effort to discredit Wilson was his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, finely attuned to his principal's wishes.

Cheney was distraught over Wilson's revelation that on his mission to Niger he had discovered that Saddam Hussein was not purchasing yellow uranium to develop nuclear weapons and that the documents that allegedly proved it were forgeries. He could have ignored Wilson, whose complaint might have faded into the woodwork. But Cheney was not trying to correct the record, but to suppress it. He knew that what Wilson had written in his New York Times Op-Ed of July 6, 2003, and what Wilson had said earlier about it at a public forum, obliquely reported, were accurate. Wilson posed a potential menace not only to the legitimacy of the Iraq invasion but also to the reelection of Bush-Cheney.

Cheney knew that the intelligence for the war had been cooked. He was not obsessed with Wilson because he was angry that Wilson was allegedly falsifying information. Cheney was not seized with a feeling of injustice or a need to inform the public of the truth. Cheney is not a fool. "Cheney knows how to read intelligence reports. He knows how to read classified information," Richard Clarke, former director of counterterrorism on the National Security Council, told me. Of course, Clarke said, "Cheney had read the reports" that disproved the administration's line. "Cheney knew it was false," said Clarke. What worried Cheney was that he was keenly aware that the so-called intelligence the administration propagated was phony, shabby and shaky. What also peeved him was that Wilson had said that his mission had been triggered by a request from the Office of the Vice President... http://tinyurl.com/2xw563 [Open in new window]
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