The Runaway Prosecutor Who Almost Lost Iraq

[Geee]

National Review:

The truth about Dick Cheney, “Scooter” Libby, and Valerie Plame.

The most explosive story in Washington, D.C., this week isn’t about Iran but about Iraq. It’s about how a runaway special prosecutor wrecked America’s chances of defeating the insurgency in the early days of the Iraq war, and left the region — and American foreign policy in the Middle East — in a shambles ever since.

These revelations come from veteran New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s new book, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey. It tells how special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald rigged the 2007 perjury trial of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, in the Valerie Plame case, and inadvertently condemned thousands of Americans to be killed and maimed needlessly in Iraq.

 

The Plame case has been shrouded in a fog of media-generated myth for almost a decade. The myth maintains that Cheney and Libby deliberately set out to blow the cover of CIA employee Valerie Plame in retaliation for an explosive op-ed that her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, published in the New York Times in July 2003. In that op-ed, Wilson contradicted the Bush administration’s assertion that Saddam Hussein had been trying to obtain yellowcake uranium in Niger in order to build an atomic bomb. The leak of Plame’s identity to columnist Robert Novak — so goes the story — led special prosecutor Fitzgerald on a two-year investigation to find the culprit, culminating in the trial and conviction of Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice.

 

We now know — and not just from Miller’s book — that virtually every element of that story is false.