I Lewis Libby
Bunker fags were looking at Cheney.
Found this old article about Scooter Libby and Valeria Plame.
Who Is Scooter Libby?
The secretive Cheney aide at the heart of the CIA leak case.
By John Dickerson
Oct 21, 20056:57 PM
Who is I. Lewis Libby? The not-Karl-Rove character at the center of the CIA leak investigation is so mysterious he hides his first name. Rove we know: He’s Bush’s political id—a self-taught master of political hardball, a brash Texan who has plotted the president’s advance for 25 years.
The adviser universally known as “Scooter” represents the other side of the Bush administration: the secret undisclosed side. Like the vice president he works for, Libby prefers to work on policy in the shadows and leave the politics to others. Unlike Rove, or even fellow neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, Libby rarely speaks on the record; he almost never gives public speeches. Unlike the Texas gang, he doesn’t boast at being an anti-intellectual and is in fact proud of his intellectual credentials. “Lewis Libby is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University School of Law,” reads the blurb under his picture on the back flap of his book, a historical novel about Japan at the turn of the 20th century.
If these two men are so different, why are Rove’s and Libby’s names now spending so much time in the same sentence? Both are under investigation by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald for telling reporters that Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA after Wilson challenged the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein sought to buy unenriched uranium from Niger. Though there is still much we do not know about their actions, one thing we can say is that the two were almost certainly leaking for different reasons. Rove’s principal instinct would have been to knock back a threat to Bush’s political standing. Libby’s natural urge would have been to push back against the CIA with whom he and his boss had been waging an ongoing war over the intelligence that led to the war itself, a war for which he was a key proponent, and in which he continues to deeply believe.
According to one report, Libby became so obsessed with knocking back Wilson’s claims, White House advisers had to step in. Arguing the point would only keep the charges alive and harm the president politically.
“Everything you know about Cheney you know about Scooter,” says one who worked with him closely. That means that Libby is discreet, big-thinking, detail-oriented, and addicted to action over show. Libby is not only chief of staff but the vice president’s top foreign-policy adviser. In the rare photos of Bush’s war counsel, Libby can be seen in the background. He particularly shares his boss’ fixation on external nuclear and bioterrorism threats. When Cheney was tasked with preparing a homeland security plan before the 9/11 attacks, it was Libby who handled it. He was minutes away from a meeting on the final report when the planes hit the World Trade Center.
Libby is a neocon’s neocon. He studied political science at Yale under former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and began working with his former teacher under Cheney at the Defense Department during the George H.W. Bush administration, thinking about grand national security strategy in the post-Cold War era. When a document outlining their thinking leaked to the New York Times, the foreign policy establishment, including many of the more moderate voices in the first Bush administration, howled at its call for pre-emptive action against nations developing weapons of mass destruction. After 9/11, what was once considered loony became the Bush Doctrine.
Libby is not political in the glad-handing way—he looks as lost as Cheney at Republican Lincoln Day dinners. But he plays internal politics with force and lack of emotion. If the State Department under Colin Powell hated Dick Cheney, it hated Scooter almost as much, viewing him accurately as a pre-eminent member of the cabal hellbent for war with Iraq. It was Libby who sat with Powell in the final session before Powell’s U.N. speech, eyeing every detail to make sure that the Secretary of State didn’t water down the case. When Libby talked privately to friends about his rivals at State during the Powell era, it often sounded like the head of one political party speaking about the other, ascribing the worst motives and rarely giving Powell’s team the benefit of the doubt.