Scooter Libby's Bigger Picture

Quin Hillyer writes at The American Spectator: Scooter Libby's Bigger Picture

Libby's lawyers had argued that he did not commit perjury because he testified as accurately as possible about a conversation that, months later, different people could legitimately remember differently. My column makes the case that Libby never should have been convicted. So did several other excellent pieces. Libby did not perjure himself or obstruct justice. Period.
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What is clear is that prosecutor Fitzgerald's theory was that Libby invented and lied about the information coming from Russert in order to excuse subsequent mentions of Plame to the New York Times' Judith Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper. But the judge and jury threw out the charges relating to Cooper and Miller: Libby was innocent on those counts. In that case, though, why would Libby have made up the bit about Russert, months later, if he had no reason to try to hide something else the jury concluded he didn't do?

The man had no reason to lie or to knowingly deceive the FBI or the courts. He quite literally had no motive.

But a Special Prosecutor had been appointed, and millions of dollars spent finding a culprit. Someone had to be found guilty of something.
AS for the WMD question:

Here's what the official Robb-Silberman commission that later looked into the WMD question found out:

The intelligence community had learned a hard lesson after the 1991 Gulf War, which revealed that the intelligence community's pre-war assessments had underestimated Iraq's nuclear program and had failed to identify all its chemical weapons sites. Intelligence analysts [HILLYER NOTE: intelligence analysts, not political pressure from the V-P's office] were determined not to fall victim again to the same mistake…. Collectors and analysts too readily accepted any evidence that supported their theory that Iraq had stockpiles and was developing weapons programs…. For good reason, it was hard to conclude that Saddam Hussein had indeed abandoned his weapons programs.

In short, the simple fact is that Ambassador Wilson's fulminations about the "16 words" were almost irrelevant. So much evidence led so many intelligence analysts and agencies into believing that Iraq had WMD that the Bush statement about uranium was mere icing not on, but in the guise of, the yellowcake.

What for strange reasons has never received the attention necessary is that American forces did actually find WMD materials after toppling Saddam Hussein. As Deroy Murdock has noted in several columns, Iraq still possessed mustard and sarin nerve agent, low-enriched uranium, and live botulinum toxin. For what it's worth, Iraq also operated a terrorist training camp just south of Baghdad called Salman Pak, and it knowingly harbored some terrorists and provided material support to many others. It repeatedly violated United Nations sanctions and repeatedly fired on American planes enforcing the "no-fly zone." And it had a history of gassing its own people.

All of which makes all of Scooter Libby's deep concerns abut Iraq, and his actions and those of the whole Bush administration, not sinister or in any way dishonest but instead understandable and even wise efforts to protect Americans from deadly future attacks.