|
Under the Sun
Cynthia Oi
|
War claims soldiers and one of the vice president's men
UNDER THE SUN
Cynthia Oi
ODD as it may seem, I. Lewis Libby and 1st Lt. Ehren Watada have something in common.
Libby was once a mandarin in the secretive satellite government of Dick Cheney. Watada is the Army officer whose refusal to deploy to Iraq has made him a symbol for war opponents and a target for its supporters.
A tangle of deceit, mistakes and exaggerations has snared both men and in that sense both are victims, though of their own making.
Libby stands accused of lying to a grand jury and FBI agents about how he came to learn that the wife of a war critic was a CIA agent. Watada says he won't fight a war he believes was based on falsehoods.
Sometime soon, maybe even today, Libby will find out where his life will be heading. A jury is set to begin deliberations in his trial on five charges, including obstructing a federal investigation into whether officials of the Bush administration broke the law by leaking the agent's identity.
Libby's troubles stem from a crazy campaign to smear a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, who had the gall to charge that the White House distorted or ignored his report discounting claims about Saddam Hussein trying to get his hands on nuclear material from Niger.
Wilson thought he'd been sent on the Africa mission on order of the vice president, but though Cheney had wanted the claims investigated, he didn't know Wilson was the guy the CIA assigned to the probe.
The problem that came to be Libby's wasn't that the intelligence had been twisted --which it was -- but that Cheney was being, in this rare case, unfairly sullied. Even macho men's skins thin when falsely tagged.
So began the smear. The plan was to get the word out that Wilson could not be credible because his wife worked for the CIA and his Niger trip was nothing more than a nepotistic boondoggle -- as if a wife's involvement, peripheral at most, would nullify Wilson's findings and erase the perversion of intelligence.
Cooked-up intelligence has been the trademark of President Bush's case for the war, but Ehren Watada isn't allowed to say that. In the Army, denouncing the decider gets you charged with conduct unbecoming an officer.
Watada's court-martial was declared a mistrial earlier this month when a judge couldn't seem to separate the lieutenant's admission that he refused to deploy from the reason why he would not go.
Watada's fate is in limbo and there's no indication how his case will unwind. Libby, barring a hung jury, will hear a verdict. Guilty or not, he has already paid heavily for his misadventure with notoriety and a damaged reputation. But he still has friends in high places and likely won't be standing in the unemployment line.
Watada also has paid and probably will continue to. His decision, for which he accepts responsibility and consequence, will be the lens through which he will be seen for as long as people remember it.
Many will. Watada's singular action is far easier to grasp and set in black-and-white terms than those of others who aren't being held to account.
Douglas Feith is one of them. As an undersecretary of defense, Feith was the point man for Donald Rumsfeld's own private intelligence cell whose assignment was to build justification for war because the CIA hadn't. In coordination with Cheney's office, Feith pumped up the Niger nuclear notion and the concocted Saddam- al-Qaida connection, among other fictions, to produce an "alternative" assessment that the Pentagon's inspector general last week too gently deemed "inappropriate."
Feith, now a visiting professor and -- get this title -- "distinguished practitioner in national security policy" at Georgetown University, blithely defended himself, echoing the inspector general's conclusion that what he did was "not illegal or unauthorized." So there.
What he, Rumsfeld, Cheney and, by implication, Bush can't claim, however, is that what they did wasn't immoral.
Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss sneered at the report, saying he could not understand why "we're beating this horse one more time." If you have to ask ...
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin since 1976. She can be reached at
coi@starbulletin.com.