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Scooter Libby Verdict:
There's Still a Scandal Here
Who Faked the Documents on Niger?
by Rachel Maddow
Remember the controversy over President
Bush's Vietnam-era military service in the 2004 campaign? That controversy
came to an abrupt end thanks to "memogate"
-- the revelation that forged documents about Bush's National Guard service
had been cited in a CBS report on the issue.
Memogate cut short Dan Rather's
career at CBS, and also effectively ended media discussion of how Bush ended
up in a "champagne unit" of the National Guard that was virtually
guaranteed to keep him out of Southeast Asia.
The furor about the apparently false documents ended up inoculating the
president from further questions about the very real underlying controversy
of his military service.
Is a similar diversion happening to us
now with the Scooter Libby trial?
The sturm und drang about Libby has focused on the question of who
leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's CIA identity. Who
disclosed her status, to whom, and when? Once those questions were being
investigated, who lied and obstructed the investigation?
The outing of Plame
is a huge story -- it was essentially a national security breach for
political purposes. The obstruction of the investigation into the Plame outing is also a very big deal.
But there's a bigger story at the root
of this: Why did they out Valerie Plame Wilson in
the first place? The short answer, the easy answer is that they were trying
to smear her husband, Joseph Wilson, who had criticized the rationale for the
war. Follow that one more step -- because now you're getting closer to what I
think is the real story, the real bombshell, the thing that mysteriously
hasn't been part of the Libby furor at all.
How did Joe Wilson criticize the
rationale for the war? He went to Niger
after the vice president's office said allegations that Saddam Hussein tried
to buy uranium in Africa should be investigated.
The CIA dispatched Joe Wilson -- a former ambassador to Gabon who had worked on the Africa
desk at the National Security Council. The Saddam-uranium allegation arose in
part from documentation that indicated that Saddam wanted 400 tons of uranium
from Niger.
That documentation, according to everyone who assessed it, was obviously
forged.
In other words, in the midst of the
lead-up to the war, and the American government hyping every shred of a
suggestion that Saddam might be a threat to us, forged documentation about
Saddam's nuclear ambitions was thrown into the mix.
Wilson came back from Niger and reported to the U.S. government that the Niger uranium
allegations were obviously bunk. Nevertheless,
months later, the Niger
uranium allegation turned up in the president's State of the Union address.
Angry that the president was citing the
allegation he had disproved, Wilson wrote his
famous New York Times op-ed, Cheney famously blew his stack, and the smearing
of Wilson and
the outing of his wife kicked into high gear.
What's been lost in all of the ensuing
scandal?
What's been lost is the question of who
forged those Niger
uranium documents. Who forged them, and how did they get into the stream of
American "intelligence" about the war? Those forgeries are a
smoking gun; they are evidence, in themselves, of the lies that were cooked
up about Iraq
to justify us starting a war there.
The fact that the documents were
obviously forged makes the scandal all the more alarming -- how does
something so noticeably fake end up being touted by the president of the United States
in a major address to the nation?
The Scooter Libby trial has been about
things that happened very far down the line from the original scandal at hand
-- Libby was convicted for obstructing the investigation into the
counterpunch to an allegation that the president asserted another allegation
had proven false. Sound convoluted? Maybe that's part of the idea.
At the root of this confusing scandal is
a very simple unexamined problem. Who forged documents about that uranium in Niger? And
why did our American government -- the president himself! -- try to sell us
those obviously forged documents as truth?
Valerie Plame
Wilson's career has been ended, all her CIA contacts on weapons of mass
destruction have been compromised, Libby will either do time in prison or be
pardoned -- those are all important consequences of the scandal set in motion
by those forged documents.
But the forged documents themselves --
and the president using them to gin up a case for war -- that's the real
scandal. That scandal is still burning at the heart of this case.
Rachel Maddow
is the host of "The Rachel Maddow Show,"
which airs nationwide on Air America Radio affiliate stations from 6 p.m. - 8 p.m.
ET .
Copyright 2007 ABC News Internet
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