With shades of Watergate, the Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial, once Vice-President Dick Cheney’s top aide and one of the highest-ranking White House officials ever to be tried, has revealed how the White House created the non-existent "Iraqi threat" and did everything to keep the lie alive - and added a few more, to replace the lie that had been exposed.

Libby's trial began with Libby appearing on crutches, symbolically underlining the limp case of how the Bush administration had created the "imminent Iraqi threat", which nevertheless convinced large sections of the American population. Since, the trial has revealed the inner workings of the Bush White House and specifically the lengths it would go to in trying to block the truth from coming out: that Iraq presented no imminent danger.

The Bush Administration needed a pretext to go to war with Iraq, but the problem was that there was no genuine evidence available. So evidence had to be created - invented. The story was floated that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy ingredients for a nuclear bomb from Niger in Africa. In 2002, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a man whose diplomatic service had included work in Africa, was asked by the CIA to investigate whether Iraq had recently tried to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger to be further refined to produce nuclear weapons. Wilson went to Africa, consulted his sources, but found no meaningful evidence of such a plot. He reported these negative findings to the CIA. Since, other investigations by the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations body, have equally established that the uranium story contained no single atomic particle of truth.
Though known to be a story with no foundation in fact, Bush, Cheney and others in the administration continued to present the uranium story as part of the rationale why a US invasion of Iraq was required. Even as the White House found itself apologising for the January 2003 State of the Union address, which continued to use the uranium story and other known falsehoods about the Iraqi threat, it never wavered from its resolve that Iraq needed to be invaded.

After the invasion of Iraq, Wilson could no longer stomach it. After briefing journalists anonymously, Wilson wrote a July 6, 2003, Op-Ed article for The New York Times, charging that the Bush Administration had manufactured evidence to win support for the war. It was this story, published in the country's most influential newspaper, that drove the White House into a frenzy. The man losing his temper the most was Cheney.
The Bush Administration began a smear campaign against Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. The key was Robert Novak's column on July 14, 2003, not only attacking Wilson, but specifically outing Plame as a CIA operative. Outing a CIA operative can be deemed a criminal offence in the US and the Department of Justice opened an investigation. The trial has now identified one of the unnamed senior administration officials Mr. Novak cited as his sources: Karl Rove, the man identified as "Bush's brain", as it was Rove who largely masterminded Bush's ascent to the throne. It showed the extent of the smear campaign, leading up to the highest echelons of American power.
But it goes much further than that. The trial has revealed how neoconservatives had been planning the Iraq War since the 1991 Gulf War ended. In 1997, the neoconservatives formed the Washington think tank "Project for the New American Century" (PNAC). Their first public act was a 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, calling for the swift "removal of Saddam Hussein's regime", in which they were already barking about "weapons of mass destruction". While Rove was tying to land Bush in the Oval Office, PNAC outlined its global strategy, underlining that its execution would require a new Pearl Harbour. Miraculously, 9/11 happened.

So where does Libby fit into all of this? Libby was the "executioner" of the "executive power", who broke the law because he was told to break it. Libby was charged with lying to the Justice Department and trying to obstruct their investigation. Why? Because it was indeed the White House that had leaked Plame information, in an effort to soften down and deflect the attention away from Wilson's allegations that the White House knowingly using false information against Saddam Hussein in order to have a pretext to invade his country.
The trial revealed that Libby's boss, Vice President Cheney, in order to defend himself against Wilson's accusations, even persuaded President Bush to authorise the declassification of part of one of the government's most secret intelligence briefings, the National Intelligence Estimate. Only Cheney and Libby knew the president had done that, leaving other key aides shocked to hear the vice-presidential aide leaking it to reporters by phone. Here, indeed, is how real politics work.

Libby is found guilty, but Libby's lawyers argued that he has been made a scapegoat for the misdeeds of other White House players closer to the president - specifically, it seems, his boss, Vice-President Cheney. Even the prosecution made the case that Libby had done his boss's dirty work and had then lied to cover his tracks. But the rabbit hole seems to go all the way to the Oval Office, for the trial presented one document, in Cheney's handwriting, which suggests that the President had direct knowledge of the campaign to discredit Wilson.

Still, as these revelations came about on an almost daily basis during the trial, Cheney continued to claim Iraq presented a real danger and, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, continued to claim that the Iraq invasion was the right thing to do and that there was evidence that Hussein had to be contained and dealt with.
The trial has shown that the White House will do anything, including breaking the law, to wage a war it wanted to wage. The trial revealed that, in echoes of the Pentagon Papers over the Vietnam War, that Cheney and Libby sought information about Wilson, to attack the man, in the hope that the central issue would go away.
The 2003 State of the Union included lies about Iraq and Niger. While Libby was on trial, another State of the Union was delivered. In it, Bush continued to spread lie after lie, this time claiming that his Administration had prevented four terrorist plots... none of which were genuine. This time, the focus was not Iraq, but that the US had stopped a hijacked plane from flying into the "tallest building on the West Coast", to the rest of the world known as the Liberty Tower, made famous as being blown up during the movie "Independence Day".
Bush was attacked about this alleged LA plot, with experts stating that "the plot never progressed past the planning stages". The FBI noted that "to take that and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous. At most it was a plan that was stopped in its initial stages and was not an operational plot that had been disrupted by authorities." Michael Scheuer, an Al Qaeda expert in the CIA's counter-terrorism centre, commented that "this doesn't sound like anything that I would recall as a major threat, or as a major success in stopping it. My impression [was that the National Security Council] culled through information to look for something that resembled a serious threat in 2002. It doesn't strike me, either as someone who was there or as someone who has followed Al Qaeda pretty closely, that this was really a serious sort of effort."

In short, the Administration needed to show that America is still under attack and that the Administration is doing its utmost - and succeeding at that - to stop America from being bombed.
Like the non-existent uranium sale, Bush has repeatedly used the "Liberty Tower" claim to "show" that America is still fighting the "War on Terror", though on numerous occasions, experts have claimed he should cease and desist to use it as "evidence" of plots against the US.
Of similar dubious origin is the statement that "We broke up a Southeast Asian terror cell grooming operatives for attacks inside the United States." It's an interesting statement to make, for no-one had any idea what Bush was going on about. And hence, it may be that it is a throwaway line merely there to impress the listeners, soon to be sacrificed, or alternatively to be used as a foundation upon which to build further fabricated claims.
Finally, Bush spoke about how "we uncovered an Al Qaeda cell developing anthrax to be used in attacks against America." This was no doubt a reference to the anthrax attacks that hit America in the wake of 9/11, but which were instead traced back to US military anthrax stocks, rather than an Al Qaeda plot.

Libby may have been found guilty, but the Bush Administration's methodology of fabricating lies and spreading them as gospel truth continues. And if there is one thing this trial shows, it is that to go the course, in politics, you sometimes need to sacrifice a small player, so that the big guns can remain firing their lies. The truth may set you free, but the lies, it seems, are there to spin tales that are pretexts for war.