Lewis Libby – War Criminal
Revolution #021, November 6, 2005, posted at revcom.us
Lewis "Scooter" Libby is Dick Cheney's right-hand man. He has been described as "Cheney's Cheney"--at the very center of the Bush Regime and its global war of domination.
Libby rose to power at the Pentagon during the first Bush Administration in the early 1990s. He worked at the Pentagon under war strategist Paul Wolfowitz and then-Defense Secretary Cheney. Libby was responsible for writing one of the most sinister and notorious documents in modern history: The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance.
This was a ruthless plan for the U.S. to grab global domination and hold on to it. It called for aggressively taking advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union, building an unchallengable military and using unprovoked "pre-emptive war" to prevent the emergence of any nuclear rivals. The neo-conservative "Project for the New American Century," led by Cheney and Rumsfeld, later praised this plan as "a blueprint for mantaining U.S. pre-eminence."
In 2000, Bush brought Cheney and Libby with him into the White House. And after 9/11, this global strategic blueprint was put into full operation--marketed as a "global war on terror." Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded. U.S. operatives carried out assassinations, kidnappings, and torture all over the world. And the threat was put out to all countries: "You're either with us or against us."
As his special contribution to all this, Libby's ''national security team'' worked with the Pentagon to produce fake "evidence" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Bush justified the attack on Iraq saying that Saddam's attempt to get nukes threatened the U.S.--and key to all that was Bush's claim in January 2003 that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the African country of Niger.
This whole campaign of lies had Libby's fingerprints all over it. The result was a hundred thousand dead in Iraq and a country under the agony of continuing occupation. And as everyone knows, no weapons of mass destruction were there to find.
U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, who had gone to Niger in 2002, announced that his report had told the Bush administration there had been no Iraqi purchases of uranium. In response, the White House mobilized to protect their lies and discredit Wilson's report. Libby gathered information on Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame from at least seven officials, including Vice President Cheney, and then (together with Bush's political top aide Karl Rove) started smearing Wilson to the media.
When accused of these leaks, Libby lied to the grand jury--to protect himself, and the others in the White House who were involved. There is now talk that Libby may get a plea bargain--so the Bush Regime would be protected and avoid the exposures that would come out in a trial. The prosecutor in this case said: "This indictment is not about the war."
But the truth is: All this is about the war--the lies, cover-ups and dirty tricks used to justify the invasion, occupation, and continuation of an unjust war.
The world needs to know all the details of this case--including the FULL involvement of Cheney, Bush and everyone else in this government who lied to justify their war crimes and then lied to cover it all up.