[Mb-civic] A Leak, Then a Deluge - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

A Leak, Then a Deluge
Did a Bush loyalist, trying to protect the case for war in Iraq, 
obstruct an investigation into who blew the cover of a covert CIA operative?

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 30, 2005; Page A01

Air Force Two arrived in Norfolk on Saturday morning, July 12, 2003, 
with Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff aboard. They had come 
"to send forth a great American ship bearing a great American name," as 
Cheney said from the flag-draped flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS 
Ronald Reagan.

As Cheney returned to Washington with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the two 
men spoke of the news on Iraq -- the most ambitious use of the war 
machine Reagan built two decades before. A troublesome critic was 
undermining a principal rationale for the war: the depiction of Baghdad, 
most urgently by Cheney, as a nuclear threat to the United States.
Defending the war became the animating priority aboard Air Force Two 
that day. According to his indictment on Friday, Libby "discussed with 
other officials aboard the plane" how he should respond to "pending 
media inquiries" about the critic, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson 
IV. Apart from Libby, only press aide Catherine Martin is known to have 
accompanied Cheney on that flight.

The crimes alleged in Libby's indictment would come later. But the 
flight from Norfolk marked a transition in the four-month slide from 
politics as usual -- close combat in defense of the president's policies 
-- to what a special prosecutor described as perjury and obstruction of 
justice. Summer would give way to fall before Libby reached the point of 
no return, with his first alleged lies to the FBI. But he skirted the 
line soon after stepping off the aircraft.

That Saturday afternoon, the indictment states, is when Libby confirmed 
for Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and disclosed to Judith Miller of 
the New York Times the classified fact that Wilson's wife, who was known 
as Valerie Plame, "worked at the CIA." Just over two weeks earlier, 
after a previous conversation with Cheney, Libby had told Miller more 
tentatively that Plame "might work at a bureau of the CIA."

It may never be clear what drove Libby, the most cautious of Washington 
insiders, to take such risks, ostensibly to protect the administration. 
In a news conference Friday, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald 
described the question as unanswerable so far. "If you're asking me what 
his motives were, I can't tell you; we haven't charged it," Fitzgerald 
said. The obstruction of his inquiry, he said, "prevents us from making 
the fine judgments we want to make."

Libby's possible motive is only one of many unknowns left in the 
aftermath of Friday's indictment, which prompted the resignation of one 
of the most powerful figures in the White House and left the Bush 
administration reeling politically. Still to be determined is who first 
leaked Plame's name to syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak -- the 
original act that led to Fitzgerald's investigation -- and the roles of 
many other administration officials, including Deputy Chief of Staff 
Karl Rove.

Even so, the grand jury's 22-page indictment fleshes out a saga that has 
been largely shrouded for almost two years by grand jury secrecy. While 
Friday's disclosures allege no wrongdoing by Cheney, they place the vice 
president closer than has been known before to events at the heart of 
the case.

One notable disclosure is that Libby and Cheney made separate inquiries 
to the CIA about Wilson's wife, and each confirmed independently that 
she worked there. It was Cheney, the indictment states, who supplied 
Libby the detail "that Wilson's wife worked . . . in the 
Counterproliferation Division" -- an unambiguous declaration that her 
position was among the case officers of the operations directorate. That 
conversation took place on June 12, 2003, a month before the Norfolk 
flight and nearly two weeks before Libby first told a reporter about 
Plame's CIA affiliation.

(continued)...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/29/AR2005102901478.html?nav=hcmodule
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