Iraq war is the real “underlying crime” in the Libby indictment

[IndianaGreen]

Iraq war is the real “underlying crime” in the Libby indictment
By Bill Van Auken
29 October 2005

The smear against the Wilsons was a continuation of a conspiracy to drag the American people into war, involving top officials within the US government—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld.

Libby, though not in the public eye, was a prominent member of this conspiracy. In 1992, in the first Bush administration, he was, together with Paul Wolfowitz, the author of a Defense Department document advocating the use of “preemptive” war against countries seeking to obtain weapons capabilities and those “aspiring to a larger regional or global role” in conflict with US domination. As a member of the Project for a New American Century, he was one of those advocating a war against Iraq long before the Bush administration seized upon the September 11 attacks as a pretext.

Within the administration, Libby played a pivotal role in organizing a parallel intelligence operation based in the Pentagon and the vice president’s office and tasked with manufacturing phony evidence that Iraq represented a military threat to the US.

The indictment against this prominent senior official is not, as Fitzgerald claimed Friday, an indication that the US is a “country that takes its law seriously.” If this were the case, the legally binding treaties that bar wars of aggression and torture would have brought Bush, Cheney and the entire administration into the defendant’s dock long ago.

Rather, it is a manifestation of a bitter conflict within the state itself. The tensions over intelligence that arose in the run-up to the war between the Pentagon and the White House, on the one hand, and the State Department and the CIA, on the other, have now given rise to recriminations over the political and military disaster that US imperialism is confronting in Iraq.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/libb-o29.shtml

[ktlyon]

1. but I'm not sure Fitzgerald will go there but you are right

it is the big picture and the big crime