When a Washington jury hears testimony in mid-January in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the narrow question at hand will be whether Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff purposely lied to FBI agents and grand jurors investigating the leak that exposed Valerie (Plame) Wilson as a CIA officer. But the trial is about more than Libby's false statements. At issue is why he didn't tell the truth. And that leads to the number-one transgression of the Bush Administration: how it sold a war on phony pretexts. This trial, which comes when nearly three-quarters of the public don't approve of George Bush's war in Iraq, is a sharp reminder that the White House presented a spurious case for war and then desperately tried to preserve a PR campaign at odds with reality.

Recall that the Plame leak occurred because the White House, in mid-2003, was trying to discredit a critic who had challenged its argument for war when its main justification for it--that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was developing a nuclear bomb--was being undermined by facts on the ground. Shortly after the invasion, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson began privately telling reporters that Bush's prewar charge that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa was wrong. In 2002 the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to check out this claim (based on poorly forged documents), and he had concluded that it was highly unlikely. When reporters started writing about Wilson's mission without naming him, Libby and Cheney gathered information on him. They learned that his wife was an officer at the CIA division that had dispatched Wilson to Niger.

As news stories appeared with intelligence-community leaks suggesting that the White House had manipulated the prewar intelligence, Cheney, Libby and other Bush aides felt threatened. In an off-the-record conversation with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Libby dismissed Wilson's trip to Niger and mentioned that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA (her employment at the agency was classified information). When Wilson publicly charged that the White House had "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat," the White House went into negative-campaign mode, hoping to undercut the first public critic who had inside information. Libby and Bush strategist Karl Rove told reporters about Wilson's wife, as if his trip to Niger had merely been a nepotistic junket. Evidence developed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicates that Cheney was directly involved in the anti-Wilson activity.

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