Hidden Things
“Therefore seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not; but have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.” II Corinthians 4:1-2
Scooter Libby is going to prison for doing his job. His job was to do what his boss, Dick Cheney told him to do. Cheney told Libby to discredit Iraq war critic Joe Wilson who had published an op-ed piece in the NY Times questioning that administration’s case for invading Iraq. Libby was going to do that by letting the press know that Wilson’s trip to Africa for the CIA to check out reports of Saddam trying to buy uranium, was actually arranged by Joe Wilson’s wife who worked for the CIA. So clearly there was some conflict of interest in the trip, and as a result, Wilson’s motives and credibility was suspect. The only problem with the whole thing is that Valerie Plame, Wilson’s wife, was technically under cover at the CIA and revealing her identity is a crime.
Regardless of what you think of these guys, they aren’t dumb. They may make mistakes in judgment, but they don’t break the law unknowingly. Libby, for example, is an Ivy-league trained lawyer. He knew what Cheney was asking him to do, and he probably told Cheney what the risks were. But he was also one of the architects of the whole neo-conservative vision of remaking Iraq in our image and likeness.
Now Libby is going to jail.
If you think that perhaps this is just an isolated incident of poor judgment, let’s see what else our pal Dick has been up to.
We probably should have known that Cheney was planning to make major changes in the public’s right to know when early in the Bush administration he organized a secret meeting of oil company execs to hammer out an energy plan. Now that we’re living the results of that plan, I can appreciate why he didn’t want to share it with us.
More recently we heard about Cheney’s attempts to coerce John Ashcroft to sign off on the President’s domestic spying plan by visiting him in the middle of the night in his hospital room. The reason for the visit is that those who were left in charge at the Justice Department during Ashcroft’s illness also refused to authorize the plan. The President approved that plan anyway, but Cheney wasn’t done. He later intervened to block the promotion of one of the attorney’s who opposed him, even though it had since come out that the Justice Department lawyers were interpreting the law correctly.
Now we discover that Cheney has ordered the secret service to stop its practice of logging those who visit the President and the Vice President. Those logs were crucial in helping expose Nixon’s involvement in Watergate.
And we recently also discovered that in 2001, he ended the practice of releasing Presidential papers twelve years after that President is out of office. What was significant about that date? He was blocking the release of the papers of Ronald Reagan under whom he served. Those papers would have shed new light on a number of scandals which occurred during the Reagan years. It appears that we are going to have to wait until Cheney is out of office to find out whether or not Cheney was involved in any way.
Fortunately, his remaining time in office is short. Hopefully his influence will also wane as the truth continues to come out, as it always does.