The Corpus Callosum

Verdict of perjury
Sunday, March 11, 2007

Conviction of vice presidential aide I. Lewis Libby last week had little to do with the core allegations in the CIA leak affair, but it said something big about American law. Perjury and obstruction of justice are about basic citizen obligations to speak truthfully under oath and, at least, not create barriers to official investigations.

Beyond that, this trial exposed a reprisal mentality in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, an overzealotry in pursuit of a political attacker. Libby, then-chief of staff to Mr. Cheney, wanted to strike back at former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV who in 2003 had published in the New York Times a scathing criticism of the administration's basis for invading Iraq. Libby's conversations with reporters about Mr. Wilson and his CIA-employee wife Valerie Plame -- specifically whether Libby was truthful in speaking with FBI investigators and a grand jury -- became the meat of the trial. The 11-person jury believed the journalists' version of those talks.

And that judgment deserves the respect of the country and certainly should be a reminder of the seriousness of any citi-

zen's obligations when speaking under oath. That's despite the fact that the scandal upon which this trial developed was hollow. A bipartisan Senate inquiry in 2004 found that Mr. Wilson's now-famous op-ed article was false -- that his report to the CIA did not dispute British claims, cited by President Bush, that Iraq was seeking uranium there but actually supported that conclusion. The claim that Mr. Wilson's wife was a covert CIA agent and was outed by Libby's leaks was similarly unfounded. She worked in an open CIA role, so disclosure of her identity was no crime. In any case, that information came to a newspaper column not from Libby but from a State Department official, Richard Armitage.

So there was no crime at the center of this affair. Arguably, the case never should have come to trial. But there was a duty for Lewis Libby to be truthful to investigators. The jury's judgment that he didn't, at least for now, has to be the nation's conclusion as well.