George W. Bush's Propaganda War Goes on Trial
BLACK DAYS FOR LIBBY, ROVE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
They are two of the Bush administration's most trusted advisors: I. Lewis Libby and Karl Rove. Now, one has been indicted and the other may be soon. The affair promises to put the administration's Iraq policy on trial and will ask uncomfortable questions about just how much the danger from Iraq was exaggerated. The answer may also make things awkward for the New York Times.
The man is a well-trained mathematician with a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His friends in the Pentagon chose him to be the first head of state in a democratic Iraq. His single-minded persuasiveness was enough to convince even a hard-nosed New York Times reporter like Judith Miller that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. And he even managed to convince a crusty old curmudgeon like US Vice President Dick Cheney that Iraqis would welcome their American liberators with cheers and rose petals.
But the man is also a convicted bank defrauder. He never did quite manage to become head of Iraq, but climbed as high as prime minister. He fell from White House grace because when American troops reached Baghdad, there were no rose petals to be found.
Now, though, comes the show-stopper in this back-and-forth biography: This week, 60-year-old Ahmed Chalabi -- only briefly out of favor in the White House -- will return once more to Washington for a friendly reception as a guest of the United States of America. Chalabi -- known both as a dishonest rascal and as an assertive schemer -- is the only one the White House really trusts to create a realistic coalition of Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis in Baghdad. And such a coalition is an absolute prerequisite to any thoughts of American withdrawal from the country.
The very fact that Washington's hopes are once again pinned on such a charlatan says a lot about just how desperate the situation in Iraq has become. In the middle of last week -- a week which quickly became one of the darkest of the 250 weeks US President George W. Bush has occupied the White House -- American deaths in Iraq reached the symbolic threshold of 2,000 victims.
Cheney's indicted advisor
And by the end of last week, it had become abundantly clear that the president and his team would likewise have to give up the hope of being able to escape responsibility for a war based on ultimately untenable arguments -- all of which have emerged as chimeras. On Friday, the pre-history of the Iraq war finally became the matter for a court of law; Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicted the vice president's closest advisor I. Lewis Libby. More than that, Fitzgerald made it clear that he may even go further -- to President Bush's chief advisor Karl Rove.
Rove, 54, Deputy White House Chief of Staff -- and the man who both friends and foes of the president refer to as Bush's Brain -- will in all likelihood soon be called before a court. Cheney's right hand man "Scooter" Libby, 55, comes first.
Their offenses may seem rather minimal: The two top White House advisors may be responsible for having revealed the identity of a CIA agent. Libby, at least, during investigations into the case, may have lied to investigators and misled a grand jury. In a word, perjury.
But there is one small factoid that provides the case with political explosiveness: The uncovering of the CIA agent, Valerie Plame, was a part -- even if a small one -- of the pre-Iraq War propaganda offensive. And by no means is it just the top advisors who are involved in the case.
Indeed, it was Cheney himself who in spring 2002 -- almost a year before the US military marched into Baghdad -- made the completely unsupported assertion that Saddam Hussein had restarted his nuclear program. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security advisor, took up the war chant with her catchy warning against Saddam's nuclear plans. "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons," she said. "But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
The current trial will have to confront the fabrication of intelligence that lead to such overstatements and untruths.
Loose Lipped Libby
At its heart, though, will be a vendetta embarked on by an administration that wanted to put an irritating critic in his place. And it's a vendetta that makes all participants look bad. In his State of the Union address in 2003 Bush -- in looking to prove the existence of Saddam's nuclear weapons program -- asserted that the dictator had attempted to buy uranium in the form of yellow cake from Niger. The only problem? The rumor had long since been disproved. Six months later, former acting ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson wrote, in a piece for the New York Times, that he himself had investigated the paper trail that allegedly proved the yellow cake accusations and had found the documents to be forgeries.
The rejoinder was not long in coming. The conservative journalist Robert Novak, a Bush Administration supporter, warned his readers against taking Wilson seriously. His government-sponsored research trip to Niger, Novak wrote, was a low-level formality organized by his wife -- and CIA agent -- Valerie Plame.
More than the assertion that Wilson's mission was little more than a pleasure trip, it was the exposure of Plame as a CIA agent that turned heads. After all, under US law, it is a crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, to reveal the identity of a CIA agent. Immediately, the administration was accused of leaking Plame's identity as a way of getting back at Wilson. Wilson, himself not exactly well-endowed in the class department, enjoyed his sudden fame as a Bush victim and did what he could to keep the affair in the headlines.
Nobody, though, pursued Wilson more doggedly than Cheney's chief of staff Libby. Even before Wilson's article appeared, Libby leaked the background of the coming scandal to New York Times reporter Judith Miller -- a reporter who, thanks to reliance on information from Chalabi, had become convinced of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Indeed, after the Iraq War, the New York Times even felt the need to apologize for having gullibly swallowed the government line on Iraq and regurgitating it in the paper. Most of the articles the paper apologized for had been written by Judith Miller.
Libby, for his part, was likely only following marching orders given by his boss, Dick Cheney. The vice president, after all, had become the main Iraq hawk within the Bush administration. So much so that his old friend Brent Scowcroft -- who was President George H. W. Bush's security advisor during the 1991 Gulf War at the same time when Cheney himself was secretary of defense -- today considers Cheney "the real anomaly in the administration" and says, even after a 30 year friendship, he doesn't know Cheney anymore, as the weekly magazine the New Yorker reported.
The chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, has, like Scowcroft, also recently made headlines with critique of Cheney. He says that American foreign policy in the run up to the invasion of Iraq was "made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld." His point: the vital decision to go to war in Iraq was made outside the usual policy-making channels.
Vice President Dick Cheney was generally wary of the CIA. Libby thus made it a habit to read raw intelligence reports prior to their being processed by CIA experts; an analysis as to the reliability of the intelligence sources was often left out of the equation. The result was over-reliance on informants like Chalabi -- whose self-serving analyses of the situation in Iraq came to have a direct influence on American foreign policy.
Embellishing the evidence
Like Libby, Karl Rove too was part of the super-secret White House Iraq Group. Founded seven months before the invasion by Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card, the group's mission was to sell the Iraq invasion to the American public and to communicate the grave danger presented by the existence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. The circle, which also included now Secretary of State Rice and Bush's current National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, did its best to take what thin evidence there was for a Iraqi WMD program and embellish it as much as possible. Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald seems to have taken a special interest in the work of this propaganda unit.
Rove, accompanied by a small army of lawyers, has already spent weeks trying to avoid an indictment. And the Bush White House is panicked at the prospect of losing some of its closest colleagues -- an event that could completely paralyze Bush's second administration. "These will be very, very dark days for the White House," the Washington Post recently quoted Andrew Card as saying.
Bush's second term -- something of a disaster even without the scandal -- is threatening to turn into a quagmire of indignity and intrigue. Indeed, one is reminded of the second terms of Bill Clinton (Monica Lewinsky) and Ronald Reagan (Iran-Contra Affair) before him.
Clinton, though, even at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, could always rely on support from inner circle and from the party faithful. Bush, on the other hand, may have to do without some of his most experienced strategists -- and at a time when his public support is quickly eroding.
Some in his party have attacked him because of the immense budget deficit. Neo-conservatives are angry about what they see as a somewhat directionless Iraq policy. Religious fundamentalists, for their part, are unhappy about his nomination of his legal advisor Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. In the eyes of many Christian fundamentalists, Miers -- herself a born-again Christian -- hasn't done enough for religious life in the United States. Last Thursday, she was forced to withdraw her candidacy.
Not just the White House
And it is not just the White House whose employees have caught the attention of the law. Republican congressional leaders are likewise back-pedalling. Tom DeLay, until last month the influential majority leader in the House of Representatives, has only recently had to succumb to the disgrace of being fingerprinted by a Texas sheriff. He is suspected of money laundering. Bill Frist, his counterpart in the Senate, is likewise under suspicion. His alleged offence: profiting from insider trading in the Hospital Corporation of America -- a chain of hospitals founded in 1968 by his father and brother.
Not even Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald is able to present himself as a knight in shining armor. At the beginning of the investigation, the son of Irish immigrants seemed to be doing everything right. He quickly became known as a workaholic who would often send e-mails to his assistants as late as 2 a.m. His file cabinets soon filled with dirty laundry and leftovers of fast-food meals were piled everywhere in his office as even cleanliness took a back seat to his work.
In Chicago, where Fitzgerald has worked as a federal prosecutor since 2001, he has become known as a carbon copy of Eliot Ness, the man who famously brought down Al Capone. And his reputation as an untiring investigator has proven true in Washington as well. Not only has he confiscated e-mails and day planners from the White House, but he has even managed to get his hands on the telephone list of the presidential jet Air Force One.
Still, at a time when his current investigation wasn't going well, he didn't shy away from taking aim at freedom of the press. He managed to have those journalists detained to whom Valerie Plame's true identity as a CIA agent had been leaked. And these inscrupulous methods worked.
Government agents in the Times
New York Times reporter Judith Miller sat in jail for 85 days before she -- following consultations with Libby's lawyer -- was willing to identify Libby as her source. But when it became known exactly what her ensuing testimony revealed, her employer -- which had transformed Miller into a martyr of press freedom -- suddenly no longer appeared in such positive light.
Miller, as it turned out, emerged as a journalist who allowed herself to be manipulated by the government for its own good. Even New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller was forced to admit -- in an e-mail to Times staff -- that Miller had perhaps misinformed her superiors about the role she had played in the campaign against Plame's husband Wilson.
Since then, the reputation of the most important newspaper in the United States has been tarnished. Not only do its journalists have high-up sources within the government. Rather, the unseemly and trusting relationship between Miller and Libby makes one wonder if perhaps the government also had its agents within the New York Times -- and that at a time when America was becoming involved in a war that has revealed itself to be a deadly mistake.
Hans Hoyng and Georg Mascolo
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,382421,00.html
They are two of the Bush administration's most trusted advisors: I. Lewis Libby and Karl Rove. Now, one has been indicted and the other may be soon. The affair promises to put the administration's Iraq policy on trial and will ask uncomfortable questions about just how much the danger from Iraq was exaggerated. The answer may also make things awkward for the New York Times.
The man is a well-trained mathematician with a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His friends in the Pentagon chose him to be the first head of state in a democratic Iraq. His single-minded persuasiveness was enough to convince even a hard-nosed New York Times reporter like Judith Miller that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. And he even managed to convince a crusty old curmudgeon like US Vice President Dick Cheney that Iraqis would welcome their American liberators with cheers and rose petals.
But the man is also a convicted bank defrauder. He never did quite manage to become head of Iraq, but climbed as high as prime minister. He fell from White House grace because when American troops reached Baghdad, there were no rose petals to be found.
Now, though, comes the show-stopper in this back-and-forth biography: This week, 60-year-old Ahmed Chalabi -- only briefly out of favor in the White House -- will return once more to Washington for a friendly reception as a guest of the United States of America. Chalabi -- known both as a dishonest rascal and as an assertive schemer -- is the only one the White House really trusts to create a realistic coalition of Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis in Baghdad. And such a coalition is an absolute prerequisite to any thoughts of American withdrawal from the country.
The very fact that Washington's hopes are once again pinned on such a charlatan says a lot about just how desperate the situation in Iraq has become. In the middle of last week -- a week which quickly became one of the darkest of the 250 weeks US President George W. Bush has occupied the White House -- American deaths in Iraq reached the symbolic threshold of 2,000 victims.
Cheney's indicted advisor
And by the end of last week, it had become abundantly clear that the president and his team would likewise have to give up the hope of being able to escape responsibility for a war based on ultimately untenable arguments -- all of which have emerged as chimeras. On Friday, the pre-history of the Iraq war finally became the matter for a court of law; Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicted the vice president's closest advisor I. Lewis Libby. More than that, Fitzgerald made it clear that he may even go further -- to President Bush's chief advisor Karl Rove.
Rove, 54, Deputy White House Chief of Staff -- and the man who both friends and foes of the president refer to as Bush's Brain -- will in all likelihood soon be called before a court. Cheney's right hand man "Scooter" Libby, 55, comes first.
Their offenses may seem rather minimal: The two top White House advisors may be responsible for having revealed the identity of a CIA agent. Libby, at least, during investigations into the case, may have lied to investigators and misled a grand jury. In a word, perjury.
But there is one small factoid that provides the case with political explosiveness: The uncovering of the CIA agent, Valerie Plame, was a part -- even if a small one -- of the pre-Iraq War propaganda offensive. And by no means is it just the top advisors who are involved in the case.
Indeed, it was Cheney himself who in spring 2002 -- almost a year before the US military marched into Baghdad -- made the completely unsupported assertion that Saddam Hussein had restarted his nuclear program. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security advisor, took up the war chant with her catchy warning against Saddam's nuclear plans. "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons," she said. "But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
The current trial will have to confront the fabrication of intelligence that lead to such overstatements and untruths.
Loose Lipped Libby
At its heart, though, will be a vendetta embarked on by an administration that wanted to put an irritating critic in his place. And it's a vendetta that makes all participants look bad. In his State of the Union address in 2003 Bush -- in looking to prove the existence of Saddam's nuclear weapons program -- asserted that the dictator had attempted to buy uranium in the form of yellow cake from Niger. The only problem? The rumor had long since been disproved. Six months later, former acting ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson wrote, in a piece for the New York Times, that he himself had investigated the paper trail that allegedly proved the yellow cake accusations and had found the documents to be forgeries.
The rejoinder was not long in coming. The conservative journalist Robert Novak, a Bush Administration supporter, warned his readers against taking Wilson seriously. His government-sponsored research trip to Niger, Novak wrote, was a low-level formality organized by his wife -- and CIA agent -- Valerie Plame.
More than the assertion that Wilson's mission was little more than a pleasure trip, it was the exposure of Plame as a CIA agent that turned heads. After all, under US law, it is a crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, to reveal the identity of a CIA agent. Immediately, the administration was accused of leaking Plame's identity as a way of getting back at Wilson. Wilson, himself not exactly well-endowed in the class department, enjoyed his sudden fame as a Bush victim and did what he could to keep the affair in the headlines.
Nobody, though, pursued Wilson more doggedly than Cheney's chief of staff Libby. Even before Wilson's article appeared, Libby leaked the background of the coming scandal to New York Times reporter Judith Miller -- a reporter who, thanks to reliance on information from Chalabi, had become convinced of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Indeed, after the Iraq War, the New York Times even felt the need to apologize for having gullibly swallowed the government line on Iraq and regurgitating it in the paper. Most of the articles the paper apologized for had been written by Judith Miller.
Libby, for his part, was likely only following marching orders given by his boss, Dick Cheney. The vice president, after all, had become the main Iraq hawk within the Bush administration. So much so that his old friend Brent Scowcroft -- who was President George H. W. Bush's security advisor during the 1991 Gulf War at the same time when Cheney himself was secretary of defense -- today considers Cheney "the real anomaly in the administration" and says, even after a 30 year friendship, he doesn't know Cheney anymore, as the weekly magazine the New Yorker reported.
The chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, has, like Scowcroft, also recently made headlines with critique of Cheney. He says that American foreign policy in the run up to the invasion of Iraq was "made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld." His point: the vital decision to go to war in Iraq was made outside the usual policy-making channels.
Vice President Dick Cheney was generally wary of the CIA. Libby thus made it a habit to read raw intelligence reports prior to their being processed by CIA experts; an analysis as to the reliability of the intelligence sources was often left out of the equation. The result was over-reliance on informants like Chalabi -- whose self-serving analyses of the situation in Iraq came to have a direct influence on American foreign policy.
Embellishing the evidence
Like Libby, Karl Rove too was part of the super-secret White House Iraq Group. Founded seven months before the invasion by Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card, the group's mission was to sell the Iraq invasion to the American public and to communicate the grave danger presented by the existence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. The circle, which also included now Secretary of State Rice and Bush's current National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, did its best to take what thin evidence there was for a Iraqi WMD program and embellish it as much as possible. Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald seems to have taken a special interest in the work of this propaganda unit.
Rove, accompanied by a small army of lawyers, has already spent weeks trying to avoid an indictment. And the Bush White House is panicked at the prospect of losing some of its closest colleagues -- an event that could completely paralyze Bush's second administration. "These will be very, very dark days for the White House," the Washington Post recently quoted Andrew Card as saying.
Bush's second term -- something of a disaster even without the scandal -- is threatening to turn into a quagmire of indignity and intrigue. Indeed, one is reminded of the second terms of Bill Clinton (Monica Lewinsky) and Ronald Reagan (Iran-Contra Affair) before him.
Clinton, though, even at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, could always rely on support from inner circle and from the party faithful. Bush, on the other hand, may have to do without some of his most experienced strategists -- and at a time when his public support is quickly eroding.
Some in his party have attacked him because of the immense budget deficit. Neo-conservatives are angry about what they see as a somewhat directionless Iraq policy. Religious fundamentalists, for their part, are unhappy about his nomination of his legal advisor Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. In the eyes of many Christian fundamentalists, Miers -- herself a born-again Christian -- hasn't done enough for religious life in the United States. Last Thursday, she was forced to withdraw her candidacy.
Not just the White House
And it is not just the White House whose employees have caught the attention of the law. Republican congressional leaders are likewise back-pedalling. Tom DeLay, until last month the influential majority leader in the House of Representatives, has only recently had to succumb to the disgrace of being fingerprinted by a Texas sheriff. He is suspected of money laundering. Bill Frist, his counterpart in the Senate, is likewise under suspicion. His alleged offence: profiting from insider trading in the Hospital Corporation of America -- a chain of hospitals founded in 1968 by his father and brother.
Not even Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald is able to present himself as a knight in shining armor. At the beginning of the investigation, the son of Irish immigrants seemed to be doing everything right. He quickly became known as a workaholic who would often send e-mails to his assistants as late as 2 a.m. His file cabinets soon filled with dirty laundry and leftovers of fast-food meals were piled everywhere in his office as even cleanliness took a back seat to his work.
In Chicago, where Fitzgerald has worked as a federal prosecutor since 2001, he has become known as a carbon copy of Eliot Ness, the man who famously brought down Al Capone. And his reputation as an untiring investigator has proven true in Washington as well. Not only has he confiscated e-mails and day planners from the White House, but he has even managed to get his hands on the telephone list of the presidential jet Air Force One.
Still, at a time when his current investigation wasn't going well, he didn't shy away from taking aim at freedom of the press. He managed to have those journalists detained to whom Valerie Plame's true identity as a CIA agent had been leaked. And these inscrupulous methods worked.
Government agents in the Times
New York Times reporter Judith Miller sat in jail for 85 days before she -- following consultations with Libby's lawyer -- was willing to identify Libby as her source. But when it became known exactly what her ensuing testimony revealed, her employer -- which had transformed Miller into a martyr of press freedom -- suddenly no longer appeared in such positive light.
Miller, as it turned out, emerged as a journalist who allowed herself to be manipulated by the government for its own good. Even New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller was forced to admit -- in an e-mail to Times staff -- that Miller had perhaps misinformed her superiors about the role she had played in the campaign against Plame's husband Wilson.
Since then, the reputation of the most important newspaper in the United States has been tarnished. Not only do its journalists have high-up sources within the government. Rather, the unseemly and trusting relationship between Miller and Libby makes one wonder if perhaps the government also had its agents within the New York Times -- and that at a time when America was becoming involved in a war that has revealed itself to be a deadly mistake.
Hans Hoyng and Georg Mascolo
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,382421,00.html
posted by R7 | 10/31/2005 09:36:00 AM
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