Libby trial reveals Cheney manipulations on Iraq

A smorgasbord of Washington insider details has emerged during the criminal trial of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby. According to testimony and evidence submitted this past week, Cheney personally orchestrated his office's 2003 efforts to rebut allegations that the Bush administration used flawed intelligence to justify the war in Iraq and to discredit ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson who had provided the proof. The defense is suggesting that Libby is now the latest victim in a coordinated effort to shift blame away from Cheney and White House advisor Karl Rove. "They're trying to set me up. They want me to be the sacrificial lamb," defense attorney Theodore Wells said, recalling a conversation between Libby and Cheney in 2003. "I will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected." Libby's attorneys revealed a note Cheney had written which the defense argues shows that Libby is a scapegoat. "Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy who was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder," Cheney wrote. Libby faces five felony counts of lying to a grand jury and FBI agents about how the identity of Wilson's wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame, was leaked to reporters days after Wilson went public with his allegations that the administration had twisted his findings to justify the war in Iraq. Libby has pleaded not guilty, contending that he misspoke and that he forgot about conversations he had with journalists amid the crush of his duties. He is not charged with the leak itself, but for the subsequent cover-up. Wilson had been sent to Africa to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from Niger for an alleged nuclear weapons program. He reported back to the State Department and the CIA that the reports were untrue, yet the claim still surfaced in President Bush's State of the Union speech in January 2003 as a reason to go to war. Wilson thought he had debunked the report, but Bush had mentioned it anyway. Cheney was then accused of suppressing and "cherry-picking" select intelligence to allow Bush to present false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Since then, the White House claim of Iraq's alleged effort to acquire nuclear materials has been widely discredited as false, and even the Bush administration no longer supports it. Wilson claims it was Cheney himself who had prompted his trip to Niger and the vice president should have received his report long before Bush spoke. In the following months, an outraged Wilson became increasingly visible in the media. As Wilson's inconvenient telling of events reached mass circulation, columnist Robert Novak wrote that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent in an article which deflected attention from Wilson's accusations onto aspersions of professional nepotism by revealing it was Plame–and not Cheney–who had given her husband the assignment to Niger. Thus began a prolonged investigation into who had disclosed Plame's identity to Novak, a federal offense. Former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage subsequently admitted leaking Plame's identity to Novak and to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. But Armitage says he did not realize Plame's job was covert. Libby is now charged with perjury for obstructing federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak. Though the focus may now be on Libby, in the first week of the trial of Cheney's former right-hand man, witnesses for the prosecution have provided an unprecedented and revealing look at the normally secretive operations of the vice president's office. For example, when Dick Cheney really needed friends in the news media, his staff was short of phone numbers. No one served up spicier morsels than Cheney's former top press assistant, Cathie Martin. Cheney's active role in the campaign to undermine Wilson has been known, but Martin's testimony is the first inside account of the administration's attempts to manage the affair. She described details of a White House media strategy, designed at the highest levels, that sought to rebut charges that Bush had misled the public in his January 2003 speech. Martin, currently White House deputy director of communications for policy and planning, described the craft of media manipulation. Martin's testimony also illustrated how doggedly Cheney insisted that the administration had significant evidence that Iraq was trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction–even after the White House had backed off that claim and admitted it was not solid enough for the president to have cited it. Martin said Cheney directed her to monitor TV and print coverage of the emerging scandal and drafted a list of talking points to shift blame away from the vice president two days after Wilson went public in the New York Times and NBC's "Meet The Press." After that much exposure, Cheney, Libby and Martin spent the next week trying get out word that Cheney did not know Wilson, did not ask for the mission to Niger, never got Wilson's report and only learned about the trip from news stories in 2003. Cheney personally dictated these talking points to Martin. She emailed them to the White House press secretary for relay to reporters. Cheney also told Martin to alert the news media that a highly classified and recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) indicated no doubts about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium. Intelligence analysts have said that the uranium claim was never a key finding of the NIE and that there were doubts about it. On college-rule paper, in blue ink, Martin scribbled what Cheney told her reporters needed to know about the Niger controversy as they conferred in his Capitol Hill office on July 7, 2003. "As late as last October, the considered judgment of the intel community was that SH [Saddam Hussein] had indeed undertaken a vigorous effort to acquire uranium from Africa, according to NIE," she wrote. When Wilson's story did not die, and the press stopped calling Cheney's office, Martin called National Security Council and CIA press officers to learn which reporters were still working on stories. Once Martin got names, Cheney ordered Libby to call the journalists himself–a signal of the topic's importance. Top levels of the Bush administration decided that CIA Director George Tenet would issue a statement taking the blame for allowing Bush to mention the Niger story. Cheney and Libby worried Tenet would not go far enough to distance the vice president from the affair. Libby asked Martin to map a media strategy in case Tenet fell short. Martin offered these options in order: -Put Cheney on "Meet the Press." -Leak an exclusive version to a selected reporter or the weekly news magazines. -Have national security adviser Condoleezza Rice or Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld hold a news conference. -Persuade a third party or columnist to write an opinion piece that would appear in newspapers on the page opposite the editorials. Not only did Tenet leave unanswered questions about Cheney, his remarks came out late on a Friday, the government's favorite moment to deliver bad news. Why? "Fewer people pay attention to it later on Friday," Martin testified. "And in our view, fewer people are paying attention on Saturday, when it's reported." As Martin rated their options, putting Cheney on "Meet the Press," "[was] our best format…. We control the message a little bit more." Next they could give an exclusive or leak to one reporter and she considered David Sanger of the New York Times, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, or Time or Newsweek. Because reporters are competitive, "if you give it to one reporter, [others are] more likely to write the story," Martin testified. Plus an official can demand anonymity in return for the favor. "You can give it to them as a senior administration official," she said. "You don't have to say this is coming directly from the White House." The news weeklies offered a focus on the big picture and opinion-editorial writers and columnists could voice opinions. Her account of events backed up the prosecution's case that Libby found out Plame's identity from administration officials rather than from reporters, as he told investigators. Martin said she learned that Plame worked for the CIA after Libby told her to call the agency to get more information about Wilson's trip to Niger. Martin said she quickly passed on Plame's name to Libby and Cheney. Martin said Libby directed her to ask the CIA which journalists were calling with questions about Wilson's Africa trip, then personally telephoned at least one in an attempt to influence the broadcast.