Scooter Libby's Lying Habit

Good piece in Tom Paine/Common Sense:

As the scandal over the outing of the CIA agent mushrooms throughout the White House, people are asking an obvious question: Why didn’t the vice president’s indicted chief of staff and other senior White House officials just publicly and directly rebut Ambassador Wilson’s criticism? He said that the administration “twisted” some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program “to exaggerate the Iraqi threat” and mislead us into the war with Iraq.

Those were deadly serious charges that the administration should have been able to rebut rather quickly and easily. But it never did. Instead, the Libby indictment alleges that the vice president’s former chief of staff and other administration officials engaged in a far-reaching effort to discredit Wilson and disclose the identity of his CIA agent wife. This was all done by off-the-record leaks from senior administration officials who insisted that reporters conceal their identities.

Yesterday’s Why Would Libby Lie? explored why Libby might have lied months after the leaking was done: to prevent a scandal from breaking out in the weeks before November 2004, which would have threatened the president’s re-election. But why, in the summer of 2003, leak in the first place? Why plan a sneak attack on Wilson, and why out his CIA-operative wife?

To answer those questions, we have to revisit what was happening when the leaks occurred. In late spring, early summer 2003, the war was becoming much more difficult and more protracted than anyone in the Bush administration ever suggested might happen. The press and others were just beginning to raise serious questions about the justifications offered for the war, particularly because not a single weapon of mass destruction had been found.

It was right at that time that Ambassador Wilson began to publicly state that “some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted [by the administration] to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” Wilson based this on personal knowledge because the CIA sent him to the African country of Niger, in February 2002, to investigate whether the veracity of a report that Iraq was trying to obtain materials for building nuclear weapons.