Guilty verdict helps U.S. reclaim prewar truths

Lewis Libby thought he had a license to lie. After 10 days of deliberation, a thoughtful, well-educated, dedicated jury thought otherwise and convicted Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff of one count of obstruction of justice, one count of lying to the FBI, and two counts of perjury. The jury, in the end, responded to the final words of the final closing argument by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald: With their verdict, they helped reclaim the truth for the justice system.

But it is not the justice system alone which must reclaim the truth. Lewis Libby thought he had a license to lie to help preserve lies that others had told. By May of 2003, one of the most explosive charges that President George Bush had made in the prelude to the invasion of Iraq was being slowly exposed. On the solemn occasion of his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush had claimed that intelligence had verified that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger suitable for making nuclear weapons. Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson knew that this claim had been exposed as a fraud in February of 2002 to both the State Department and the CIA. He had gone to Niger, indirectly as a result of a request by Vice President Cheney to the CIA that someone investigate the report. He concluded that the Niger claim was unequivocally wrong. Others pointed out that the document allegedly verifying the sale was an obvious forgery, allegedly signed by a Niger official who had not been in office for over a decade at the time of his alleged signature. Wilson finally began talking to reporters, including the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff and the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus. Kristoff’s column ran in May of 2003, and Pincus began asking questions shortly thereafter. Neither named Ambassador Wilson as his source, but Libby, Cheney and others quickly knew that he had begun exposing the truth. Within the next month and a half, Wilson was punished for his honesty as the status of his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, as a covert CIA agent was disclosed to the world.

Ms. Wilson’s undercover career had been dedicated to stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction. It was now destroyed to help preserve the lie that Iraq had had WMDs.

At best, Bush’s claim to the nation was an artful half-truth. To lay out a claim to the nation and not explain that the CIA considered the claim unfounded is to be less than honest. There is a reason that witnesses in any courtroom in the land are sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. At a time the nation is being asked to commit the lives of its children and the fortune of its grandchildren to war, the nation is entitled to the whole truth.

But the claim about attempted Iraqi purchase of uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons was but one of many half-truths told by Bush, Cheney and others in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion. Cheney claimed on national television that Mohammed Atta, one of the pilots who flew a hijacked plane into the World Trade Center, had been photographed talking with an Iraqi diplomat in the Czech Republic. He never shared with the American people that the CIA had already debunked that claim: It knew that at the time of the photograph Atta was in Florida. CIA officials were complaining that Cheney would come to CIA headquarters and demand that they take a second and a third look at “evidence” that they had already found completely unreliable. With Bush’s consent, the Defense Department set up a separate unit under Douglas Feith to re-examine “evidence” that the CIA had already found dubious. Feith’s unit then repackaged the unreliable “evidence” without mention of the serious doubts that surrounded it.

The motto of the Bush administration in the prelude to the Iraq war was: “Why tell the whole truth when the half truth will do?”

With its verdict, the Libby jury has reclaimed the whole truth. The lies that Lewis Libby told have been exposed. We must now demand that Congress examine the half-truths and the lies that led us into this disastrous Iraq war. We must begin with examining what Vice President Cheney knew about the unreliability of the “intelligence” he spouted and when he knew it. If he bullied the nation into war based on “intelligence” he had been told was false, it is up to Congress to censure or impeach him.

Other countries, from Chile to Argentina to South Africa, have benefited from Truth Commissions. It is time America engage in such national soul-searching. Only laying out the truth of how we were drawn into the Iraqi quagmire will make another such war impossible to wage.

Only by reclaiming the truth can we reclaim our nation’s honor.

Arthur Greif is an attorney practicing in Bangor.