Cheney's right hand man going to jail

From the New York Times : "I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted today of lying to F.B.I. agents and grand jurors investigating the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative amid a burning dispute over the war in Iraq."

The Washington Post notes that Libby is the highest-ranking White House official to be indicted on criminal charges in modern times.

This has been a long time coming. This is the first conviction arising from the Bush Administration's deliberate campaign to mislead Congress and the American people into the war in Iraq. Libby was Vice President Cheney's right hand man and orchestrated a nasty smear campaign against the family of Joseph Wilson, a state department diplomat who researched, questioned and publicly doubted one of the major pieces of "evidence" of an Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program cited by the President George W Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address.

Libby was found guilty of perjury and making false statements to investigators. In the course of the trial, it became clear that his boss, the Vice President, was actively involved in the smear. From the Post again: "Testimony and evidence revealed that the vice president dictated precise talking points he wanted Libby and other aides to use to rebut Wilson's accusations against the White House, helped select which journalists would be contacted and worked with Bush to declassify secret intelligence reports on Iraqi weapons that he believed would contradict Wilson's claims."

Unfortunately deliberately misleading Congress and the American people and holding up the most obvious forgery as a cause of war is still not considered a treasonable offense. Pity.