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Arash

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Oct 31, 2005, 9:33:55 AM10/31/05

AntiWar
October 31, 2005

What Libby's Indictment Means for the Jacobins

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury

Lewis "Scooter" Libby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Libby), chief of staff to
Vice President Richard B. Cheney and assistant to the president, has been indicted
for a cover-up.

As U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Fitzgerald)
made clear at the October 28 press conference announcing Libby's indictment, he
believes Libby "went before a federal grand jury and lied under oath repeatedly and
fabricated a story about how he learned this information, how he passed it on." By
obstructing Fitzgerald's investigation, Libby has prevented Fitzgerald and the grand
jury from finding out who leaked the name of the covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame
Wilson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair), and why.

Lewis Libby did not lie, commit perjury, and obstruct justice for no reason. As
Fitzgerald made clear, these are serious crimes. For a high government official to
commit such crimes, the crime being covered up must be very serious indeed.

Those who have been following Bush's invasion of Iraq know what that crime is. They
also know who are the guilty parties.

The crime is the falsification of intelligence in order to deceive Congress and the
American people. The Bush administration could not have invaded Iraq unless Congress
and the American people believed the U.S. was in dire danger from Saddam. Forged
documents purporting to show uranium sales to Iraq and false intelligence reports
from Iraqi exiles allied with neoconservative officials in the Bush administration
served as the basis for the false claims about weapons of mass destruction and
"mushroom clouds" made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and National
Security Adviser Condi Rice.

The Bush administration neoconservatives who assembled the "intelligence" knew that
it was false. The neoconservatives had their own agenda. They used the terrorist
attacks of September 11 to turn the Bush administration to their agenda. As the
leaked top secret British government Downing Street memo
(http://www.downingstreetmemo.com) made clear, the agenda was to invade Iraq, and
"the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".

There was a conspiracy among neoconservatives holding high positions in the Pentagon,
the State Department, the vice president's office and the National Security Council.
Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson
(http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001020.html), chief of staff to Secretary
of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, described the conspirators as "a secretive,
little-known cabal … made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President
Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld".
http://groups.google.ca/group/soc.culture.iranian/msg/dd9285a9efc88835?hl=en

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson says that the secret workings of this furtive cabal took
foreign policy and decisions about war out of the normal government channels.

By creating false documents and false threats, the neoconservatives pushed the U.S.
into an invasion of Iraq as the opening step in their plan for a wider war that would
remake the Middle East.

Lewis Libby lied to the grand jury in order to protect this conspiracy.

Fitzgerald has stated that his investigations are not over. There are indications
that Fitzgerald is aware that more is involved than the blown cover of Valerie Plame
Wilson's CIA counter-proliferation operation. Fitzgerald is on the trail of the
conspirators who have committed high treason by taking America to war on false
pretenses.

Facing 30 years in prison, will Lewis Libby talk in exchange for a lighter sentence?
Will members of the cabal come forward to save themselves before other members of the
conspiracy seize the opportunity to turn state's witness?

Now that there is blood in the water, media executives will not be able to continue
to muzzle reporters. Democrats might find some backbone. Republicans might realize
that they are facing a far worse crisis than Watergate.

Will the unindicted co-conspirators at Fox News, the Weekly Standard, National
Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the New York Post, and the Washington
Times learn the Judith Miller lesson, or will they continue to serve the conspiracy
that hijacked U.S. foreign policy and deceived the country and, perhaps, President
Bush himself?

Will neoconservative strongholds such as the American Enterprise Institute
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/aei.php), the Hoover Institution
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/hoover.php), and the Heritage Foundation
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/heritage.php) continue to back the agenda of a
cabal that deceived our country into a disastrous war of aggression?

Unless America has lost its soul, Libby's indictment is the first step in the
unraveling of a criminal conspiracy of high treason. Fitzgerald's continuing
investigation could serve as the counterrevolution that overthrows the neo-Jacobin
coup engineered by the neoconservative cabal.

President George W. Bush seems determined to take himself down with his sinking
administration, declaring in the face of strong public opposition to the
ill-conceived Iraq war that he will accept nothing but "complete victory" in what he
has characterized as the first great war of the 21st century. Despite his failure as
president, Bush might survive the housecleaning with a deal that leaves his father
and Brent Scowcroft in de facto control of the White House. The elderly members of
the old Republican establishment are all that remain of the GOP's credibility.

* Dr. Roberts (http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/bios/roberts.html) is John M. Olin
Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent
Institute (http://www.independent.org). He is former assistant secretary of the U.S.
Treasury. He was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his
outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy. He is
the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/076152553X).

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/all_columns.htm
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts-arch.html
http://www.antiwar.com/roberts