The real indictments of Bush administration officials are yet to come, writes Anthony Alessandrini Opponents of the invasion and occupation of Iraq could only enjoy watching the downfall this week of I Lewis Libby, Jr, chief of staff and assistant for National Security Affairs to United States Vice-President Dick Cheney. After all, Libby was one of the main architects of a US foreign policy that culminated in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century, a think tank that has had enormous influence upon the foreign policy of the Bush administration, Libby ranks among the most powerful of the neo- conservatives currently controlling the US government. But the specific details of the case against Libby -- who resigned his position after being indicted by special prosecutor Patrick J Fitzgerald on five counts of perjury, making false statements, and obstruction of justice -- also holds the potential of obscuring as much as they reveal. After all, behind this case are the alleged attempts of the Bush administration to disseminate information known to be false in order to support the rush to war in Iraq, and to discredit all sources who might be able to effectively challenge the official story. In the political football match that surrounds the major players in this case, such as President George Bush, Vice- President Cheney, and White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, this larger context threatens to become lost. The indictment of Libby stems from the circumstances surrounding Joseph C Wilson IV, a former US ambassador to Gabon who was asked by the CIA, on behalf of Cheney's office, to investigate claims that the government of Niger had sold uranium to Iraq during the 1990s. Wilson concluded that the claims were unfounded, and reported as much to the CIA and State Department. But when US officials continued to cite the discredited claim about the uranium purchase as part of their case for war -- it was cited by President Bush in his January 2003 State of the Union Address and by Vice-President Cheney during an appearance on "Meet the Press" in March 2003 -- Wilson wrote an article in The New York Times expressing his view that the claim was false. Moreover, the article, published in June 2003, suggested that the Bush administration may have knowingly used false information to push the case for war. The subsequent smear campaign against Wilson, carried on in the press and culminating in the revelation that Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA agent, involved both Cheney's and Rove's offices, although Rove, to the relief of many conservatives in Washington, escaped indictment by Fitzgerald's grand jury. Indeed, the indictments themselves speak only to Libby's attempts to cover up the leak of a CIA officer's identity and to obstruct Fitzgerald's investigation. They do not address the real issues of the case: the attempt to manufacture and defend faulty intelligence reports in order to make a fraudulent case for the invasion of Iraq. This is why opponents of the war should be wary when interpreting the indictment of Libby. There has been a rush in the US mainstream media to consider the indictment as the final act of the drama. Furthermore, the Fitzgerald report has been consistently grouped together with Washington's other political theatre event of the week -- the withdrawal of President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers -- as part of a generic "crisis" faced by Bush. Even outside the US, this view has predominated: Britain's The Guardian described the Libby indictment as the "culmination" of a "disastrous week for the White House". But far from a culmination, the indictment and resignation of Libby should be the beginning of an accounting that has been shockingly slow to come. If the leak and subsequent cover-up are allowed to become the main focus, then the real story will be lost: that is, the knowing use of false, and often manufactured, information by the US government to justify an illegal war to the US Congress, to the citizens of the US, and to the people of the world. In this sense, opponents of the war, especially in the US, have a responsibility to temper their enthusiasm about Libby's downfall. After all, he is not the first of the neo-conservative deans to be forced from high-ranking positions. In March 2003, Richard Perle, one the most prominent proponents of the war, resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board after it was revealed that he would actively profit from government contracts directly related to the invasion and occupation. And in January 2005, Douglas Feith, the third-ranking official at the Pentagon, quietly announced that he would be stepping down from his post, partly because of ongoing investigations by the FBI and the Senate Intelligence Committee into his role in the dissemination of false intelligence reports. The porous nature of the relationship between neo-conservative think tanks and the Bush administration is part of the story here. Perle, Feith, and Libby have moved easily between the halls of government and the world of policy- influencing institutes like the Project for a New American Century. So, after their moments of supposed "disgrace", they can be instantly re-invented as influential pundits and "elder statesmen". The probability that President Bush will pardon Libby, assuming that he is ever convicted of any of the charges against him, also puts the seriousness of the indictment under doubt. In fact, the real story of the Libby indictment is the continuing, and absolute, lack of accountability that has been enjoyed by President Bush and his administration for the crimes that have been committed, and continue to be committed on a daily basis, in Iraq. The kinds of false intelligence reports that have been debunked by Joseph Wilson and others provided the basis for a war and occupation that has utterly destroyed a country and has killed more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians. The indictment of one official for perjury and obstruction of justice is, under these circumstances, not the culmination of anything. The true indictments for these larger crimes remain to be served.
