Newsweek: Libby did it "to protect the country from harm"

Bush_Eats_Beef

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Mon Oct-31-05 05:57 PM
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Newsweek: Libby did it "to protect the country from harm"

Cheney's Cheney
Right hand: He was on a mission to protect the country from harm—and detonate critics in his path. Scooter Libby's ways and means.

By Evan Thomas
Newsweek

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9866494/site/newsweek/

Nov. 7, 2005 issue - The vice president and his chief aide often shared bits of secret information, so perhaps it was unremarkable that on June 12, 2003 (according to the indictment handed up last week), Dick Cheney told Scooter Libby that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the Counterproliferation Division in the CIA's secret Directorate of Operations, also known as the Clandestine Service. Libby had been agitating to find out more about Wilson, an ex-diplomat who had been telling reporters that the administration's main case for going to war in Iraq—that Saddam had WMDs—was bogus.

It is a good bet that Cheney and Libby did not think they were conspiring to trash a political foe by ruining his wife's career as an undercover agent. Given their view of themselves and their roles in the world, especially post 9/11, it is much more likely they believed that they were somehow safeguarding the republic. It's also a good bet that they did not foresee the disastrous consequences of their conversation, as well as a series of others between Libby and government officials and several reporters in the summer of 2003. Libby, as well as his boss, operated, at least in their own minds, on a higher plane.

"Bureaucrat" is the last word I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby would ever use to describe himself. The vice president's former chief of staff and national-security adviser was no risk-averse, paper-pushing time-server. He identified with an earlier generation of brilliant amateurs who came out of private law firms and investment banks to serve their country in its hours of peril, who operated discreetly, even secretly, and cut through red tape. One sensed, listening to him talk about duty and honor in the tense months after 9/11, that his models ran deeper, to Roman centurions and Plato's Men of Silver, idealized guardians who cared nothing for celebrity or money but lived only to serve. His office in the Old Executive Office Building, Libby proudly noted, was once occupied by both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt when they served as assistant secretaries of the Navy. Portraits of the Roosevelts adorn his walls.

His greatest hero is Winston Churchill. Talking to a NEWSWEEK reporter two months after 9/11, Libby pointed to the portrait of Winston Churchill directly behind his desk. When the hijacked planes hit the Twin Towers, Libby said, the portrait shook. He grinned to show that he was kidding—but he wasn't, really. He felt an enormous spiritual kinship, he said, with the small band of men around Churchill who warned in the 1930s about the gathering Nazi storm, who were ignored and shunned—but then vindicated at England's finest hour. Libby compared Vice President Cheney to Churchill—a born leader who was instantly aware, in the moment of crisis, that destiny had called him to defend his country.