The downfall of Lewis ”Scooter” Libby, one of the leading figures in the Bush administration, was completed recently. The man who had swaggered round the White House as chief of staff to the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, was subdued as he listened to the verdict in courtroom 17 of the United States District Court, within walking distance of his former office.
Libby had looked confident when he appeared in court to hear the verdict. But as he was found guilty on the first of five charges he blinked and seemed surprised. As each verdict was announced, the blinking became more pronounced.
And so ended the political career of one of the Bush ideologues, part of the original neoconservative group known as the Vulcans who advocated an aggressive foreign policy, in particular the invasion of Iraq.
The six-week trial, with its parade of witnesses from the administration, offered a rare insight into the workings of the obsessively secretive White House. It also provided more than a glimpse of the often unsavoury relationship between the administration and the media insiders.
Witnesses provided a view of daily life inside the White House, revealing an administration paranoid about the media, and extremely sensitive about criticism.
A White House staffer revealed what Washington journalists have long suspected: that bad news should be released late on a Friday when most of the media are not paying attention or on the assumption that most stories that appear on a Saturday are not followed up.
But the real importance of the trial was the insight it offered into the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The case coincided with a shift in US public opinion from support for the war to scepticism and outright hostility, and confirmed the growing suspicion that the public had been misled.
The case was complex but it began simply enough with 16 words uttered by George W Bush in his State of the Union speech two months before the invasion. He said: ”The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
That statement was untrue. The CIA advised the president that it was sceptical about the claim — advice which Bush ignored. Joe Wilson, a former US ambassador opposed to war, went to Niger to check the claim He concluded it was nonsense, and said so in an article in The New York Times shortly after the invasion.
This appears to have enraged Bush and Cheney, according to witnesses during the trial. In what could have been an act of retribution, there was a leak to the press that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA covert agent. As a result of her identity being made public, Plame was out of a job.
Disclosing the identity of CIA agents is a criminal offence and the FBI and a grand jury conducted investigations. In the speculation about who might have leaked Plame’s identity, Libby’s name regularly came up.
The 56-year-old lawyer had long been involved with many of the individuals who would become key figures in the Bush administration. He had been taught at Yale by Paul Wolfowitz, who would later become the intellectual powerhouse of the neoconservatives.
Wolfowitz invited Libby to join him at the state department in the 1980s. In 1997, Libby became a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, the neoconservative team seeking to reshape US policy in the Middle East.
He joined Cheney, the most hawkish member of the Bush administration, as chief of staff in 2001. He was also national security adviser, shaping policy on Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea and other hotspots.
Under oath, Libby told the investigators looking into the leak of Plame’s identity that he learned her identity from a reporter, Tim Russert. The television presenter denied this. Another reporter, Judith Miller, formerly of The New York Times, spent three months in jail for refusing to disclose her sources for Plame’s identity. She was freed after Libby allowed her to name him as the source.
During the trial, prosecutors said Libby had lied. The defence claimed he had suffered a memory lapse. The jury refused to give him the benefit of the doubt and he faces a sentence of up to 25 years. But in reality he may never go to jail. His lawyers can string out the appeal long enough for Bush, before he leaves office in January 2009, to grant a pardon to his loyal follower. But his time as one of the leading advocates of the neoconservative revolution and a leading player at the White House is long over. — Â