Libby perjury trial will drag in Iraq policy

The biggest US political court case for decades opened in Washington on Jan. 16 when Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, went on trial for perjury. The trial in the district court, expected to last about six weeks, will focus on whether he lied over a CIA leak scandal. But it will examine more broadly the events that led the Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2003. In a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nine to one, the opening day was dominated by jury selection, with Libby's lawyers trying to find jurors sympathetic to the Bush administration and the decision to go to war. Witnesses will include Cheney, making it the first time a vice president has testified in a criminal court. Judge Reggie Walton asked a panel of about 60 potential jurors: "Do any of you have feelings or opinions about the Bush administration or any of its policies or actions, whether positive or negative, that might affect your ability to give a former member of the Bush administration a fair trial? "Do any of you have any feelings or opinions about vice-president Cheney, whether positive or negative, that might affect your ability to be fair in this case or that might affect your ability to fairly judge Vice President Cheney's believability?" The trial relates to events starting in 2003 when President Bush, in his state of the union address two months before the invasion of Iraq, said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." A former US ambassador, Joseph Wilson, who had been to Niger to investigate, publicly expressed doubts about the claim. The State Department leaked to the press that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. The trial addresses itself to the alleged perjury and obstruction, and not to the leak itself. The former deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, has acknowledged being the original leaker, but has not been charged, even though disclosing the name of a CIA operative is a criminal offense. He claimed he had done it inadvertently, not deliberately. Libby was indicted in October 2005, accused of lying under oath about conversations he had with three reporters regarding Plame, and obstructing FBI investigators. In testimony, he acknowledged talking to reporters about Plame but said he was only passing on information he had heard from other journalists. But the journalists testified that it was Libby who told them about Plame. Libby's lawyers submitted a list of questions designed to establish the views of potential jurors about the war but Walton did not use them. Libby plans to be a witness and claims he did not lie to investigators. His defense will be that he was dealing with a host of international issues at the time, ranging from Iran and North Korea to terrorist threats, and these clouded his memory about how and when he learned Plame's identity.