True, lies

I saw a Fox newspresenter taking on Howard Dean last night. The subject was the Libby indictment. The Foxie one was trying to put the Bush spin on the event, saying, in effect, look, this is all about the alleged crime of "outing" a CIA spook, but Libby wasn't even indicted for it. As if to say," phfft, how trivial is all this?" Dean, his face bright red trying to hold back the shrill, shot it right back, saying this was all about lying, lying to a Federal Prosecuter and a Federal Grand Jury and lying to the American people. He said Watergate was not about a robbery, it was about lies and coverup. He said Clinton's impeachment was not about having sex with Monica, it was about lying about it.

I'm going to add the following because it is well put and relevant and current, but mainly because it is said by a man from the Leech Lake Ojibwa tribe in an article I ran across, on Google News, I think. In a prior life, I spent a little time at Cass Lake as a VISTA Volunteer (for those who don't remember or know, that was a "domestic Peace Corps" type program) with that tribe, but that was so '60's, man. Here's some excerpts:

"Libby and Rove are not low-level hacks of the Lynndie England and Charles Graner variety, but Cheney and President Bush's most trusted right-hand men. So let's dispense with any ''bad apple'' theories that might be peddled as insults to our intelligence. If this plays out the way it started, we're going to smell corruption and rot emanating from the very top of the Washington food chain.

This entire scandal is about lies. Which lies? The ones we suspected all along: Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Remember Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, when he made that frightening, compelling case for war? He knew the American public would never send their children to die for oil or something so vague as a ''pax Americana.'' No, he needed something more dramatic, something visual, something scary ... a mushroom cloud!

So we heard him deliver those now infamous 16 words: ''The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'' One left that speech picturing Iraqi missiles aimed right at grandma.

Problem is, the White House had known for a year that the charges were absolutely false. In February 2002, the CIA sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate precisely those rumors. Wilson not only concluded that they were baseless, but an actual hoax using forged documents. He said so to the CIA, which passed the information up to the White House.

The case should have been closed with that. Yet there was Bush, nearly a full year after Wilson's report, beating the drums of war while chanting proven untruths. So six months later, in July 2003, Wilson penned an op-ed for The New York Times, concluding that ''the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.''

What else could he conclude? It was his investigation. Yet for that simple act of truth-telling, Wilson was delivered a not-so-divine retribution. A week after Wilson's Times article appeared, ''two senior administration officials'' were cited in Robert Novak's column outing Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative.

That not only ended Plame's 20-year career with the agency, it also endangered her colleagues at Brewster Jennings and Associates, a CIA front company monitoring WMDs. Most importantly, it sent a crystal-clear message to any government employee who might be tempted to mess with the administration's plans to go to war in Iraq: namely, that there will be consequences.

These would be meted out by the White House Iraq Group, an ad hoc committee charged with selling the war to the American public by making the case that Saddam had nuclear and biochemical weapons. Operating from Cheney's office, WHIG's membership included not only Libby and Rove, but also senior White House aides Condoleezza Rice, Mary Matalin, Karen Hughes, James Wilkinson, Nicholas Calio and Stephen Hadley.

Oh, and let us not neglect to mention Times reporter Judith Miller, who one insider recently described as ''a charter member'' of WHIG. Her job was public relations.

Of course, the real tragedy behind all these lies and cover-ups is not so much the leaking of classified information, although that's pretty bad. As the president's own father rightly remarked in 1999, ''I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the names of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.''

The greater tragedy by far is the undeniable conclusion that this grave and costly war was founded on pure deception. That is, this war has not only been waged against human beings, but truth and democracy as well."