Iraq war is the real “underlying crime” in the Libby indictment

Libby was charged Friday with obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements, felony offenses that together are punishable by up to 30 years in prison. After being told of the charges, he resigned from the government.

Justice Department Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald made it clear that the investigation into the deliberate leaking of the identity of CIA covert operative Valerie Plame Wilson had not concluded. President Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, remains a subject of this probe, having for the moment avoided an indictment. Rove’s lawyer said prosecutors told him they had “made no decision about whether or not to bring charges.”

The exposure of the CIA agent was part of a “dirty tricks” campaign aimed at discrediting and punishing her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who had publicly exposed the administration for lying to the American public about the supposed threat posed by Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.” These non-existent weapons were the principal pretext given by Washington for launching an unprovoked war against Iraq in March 2003.

The CIA had sent Joseph Wilson to Niger in 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from the African country to further Saddam Hussein’s alleged efforts to obtain nuclear weapons. Wilson found that the allegations were false and reported this back to Washington. Nonetheless, Bush repeated the allegation in his 2003 State of the Union address as part of a concerted effort to terrorize the American people into accepting a war.

Following the US invasion and the failure of American forces to find a shred of evidence of Iraqi WMD, Wilson began speaking to the media about his findings and the government’s lies. In July of 2003, he wrote an opinion column in the New York Times publicly exposing the administration’s deceit.

Unable to answer Wilson, the administration opted for the methods of political thuggery, exposing his wife’s CIA status to the media as a form of retaliation and floating the claim that she had organized his trip to Niger, with the implication that it was somehow tainted by nepotism.

The basis of the charges against Libby is that he lied to both FBI agents and the federal grand jury empanelled in the leak investigation about how he himself learned that Valerie Wilson was a CIA operative and what he told several reporters about her status.

The vice presidential aide claimed that he had learned about her employment at the spy agency from reporters calling him for confirmation, and that he had only told other members of the press that he had heard about the CIA status of Valerie Wilson from reporters.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/libb-o29.shtml