Scooter Libby Verdict: There's Still a Scandal Here

March 8, 2007 — -- Remember the controversy over President Bush's Vietnam-era military service in the 2004 campaign? That controversy came to an abrupt end thanks to "memogate" -- the revelation that forged documents about Bush's National Guard service had been cited in a CBS report on the issue.

Memogate cut short Dan Rather's career at CBS, and also effectively ended media discussion of how Bush ended up in a "champagne unit" of the National Guard that was virtually guaranteed to keep him out of Southeast Asia. The furor about the apparently false documents ended up inoculating the president from further questions about the very real underlying controversy of his military service.

Is a similar diversion happening to us now with the Scooter Libby trial?

The sturm und drang about Libby has focused on the question of who leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's CIA identity. Who disclosed her status, to whom, and when? Once those questions were being investigated, who lied and obstructed the investigation?

The outing of Plame is a huge story -- it was essentially a national security breach for political purposes. The obstruction of the investigation into the Plame outing is also a very big deal.

But there's a bigger story at the root of this: Why did they out Valerie Plame Wilson in the first place? The short answer, the easy answer is that they were trying to smear her husband, Joseph Wilson, who had criticized the rationale for the war. Follow that one more step -- because now you're getting closer to what I think is the real story, the real bombshell, the thing that mysteriously hasn't been part of the Libby furor at all.

How did Joe Wilson criticize the rationale for the war? He went to Niger after the vice president's office said allegations that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium in Africa should be investigated. The CIA dispatched Joe Wilson -- a former ambassador to Gabon who had worked on the Africa desk at the National Security Council. The Saddam-uranium allegation arose in part from documentation that indicated that Saddam wanted 400 tons of uranium from Niger. That documentation, according to everyone who assessed it, was obviously forged.

Rachel Maddow is the host of "The Rachel Maddow Show," which airs nationwide on Air America Radio affiliate stations from 6 p.m. - 8 p.m. ET.

In other words, in the midst of the lead-up to the war, and the American government hyping every shred of a suggestion that Saddam might be a threat to us, forged documentation about Saddam's nuclear ambitions was thrown into the mix.

Wilson came back from Niger and reported to the U.S. government that the Niger uranium allegations were obviously bunk. Nevertheless, months later, the Niger uranium allegation turned up in the president's State of the Union address.

Angry that the president was citing the allegation he had disproved, Wilson wrote his famous New York Times op-ed, Cheney famously blew his stack, and the smearing of Wilson and the outing of his wife kicked into high gear.

What's been lost in all of the ensuing scandal?

What's been lost is the question of who forged those Niger uranium documents. Who forged them, and how did they get into the stream of American "intelligence" about the war? Those forgeries are a smoking gun; they are evidence, in themselves, of the lies that were cooked up about Iraq to justify us starting a war there.

The fact that the documents were obviously forged makes the scandal all the more alarming -- how does something so noticeably fake end up being touted by the president of the United States in a major address to the nation?

The Scooter Libby trial has been about things that happened very far down the line from the original scandal at hand -- Libby was convicted for obstructing the investigation into the counterpunch to an allegation that the president asserted another allegation had proven false. Sound convoluted? Maybe that's part of the idea.

At the root of this confusing scandal is a very simple unexamined problem. Who forged documents about that uranium in Niger? And why did our American government -- the president himself! -- try to sell us those obviously forged documents as truth?

Valerie Plame Wilson's career has been ended, all her CIA contacts on weapons of mass destruction have been compromised, Libby will either do time in prison or be pardoned -- those are all important consequences of the scandal set in motion by those forged documents.

Rachel Maddow is the host of "The Rachel Maddow Show," which airs nationwide on Air America Radio affiliate stations from 6 p.m. - 8 p.m. ET.

But the forged documents themselves -- and the president using them to gin up a case for war -- that's the real scandal. That scandal is still burning at the heart of this case.

Rachel Maddow is the host of "The Rachel Maddow Show," which airs nationwide on Air America Radio affiliate stations from 6 p.m. - 8 p.m. ET.