IT wasn't what anybody intended, but this week Vice President Dick Cheney and some of his former aides gave the rest of us a rather instructive seminar in the symbiotic contempt that links the Bush administration and self-serving members of the Washington press corps.
The lesson began in the courtroom, where Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, is on trial for perjury, charged with lying to a grand jury about whether he told reporters that Valerie Plame -- the wife of a prominent administration critic, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV -- was a CIA agent. Libby's defense turns, in part, on assertions that the White House "sacrificed" him to protect Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political advisor, and that Libby and Rove had been instructed to manipulate the press in ways that discredited Wilson.
Wilson had been sent by the CIA to the African country of Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein had been trying to obtain yellow cake uranium mined there as part of his alleged nuclear weapon program. Wilson reported that nothing of the sort had occurred and went public with that fact when Bush and other members of the administration falsely alleged otherwise in making the case for war against Iraq.
Hussein, it turned out, had no program to develop weapons of mass destruction, and, depending on how you view things, the war in Iraq began with either lies or delusions.
Either could have been abetted by the sort of cynical media manipulation described this week when the vice president's former communications director, Catherine J. Martin, testified in Libby's trial. She described how Cheney was obsessed with Wilson's criticism, particularly after publication of an op-ed piece in the New York Times and how the vice president ordered a counteroffensive in parts of the press deemed receptive to whatever the administration wanted to dish out concerning the former diplomat. One of the options she recommended to Cheney was an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," because the program's host, Tim Russert, would allow the vice president to "control the message." (Russert, along with a number of reporters whom Libby attempted to make conduits of misinformation, will be testifying later in the trial.)
