Indicted ex-White House aide Lewis Libby played a key role in an earlier case of slanting U.S. intelligence for political gain - four years before the Iraq War when he was legal adviser to a House investigation into how communist China got U.S. nuclear secrets.
In 1999, Libby, a China expert, served on a special Republican-controlled House committee that laid the blame for the compromise of U.S. secrets almost exclusively on Democrats, despite evidence that the worst rupture of nuclear secrets actually occurred during the Reagan-Bush administration in the mid-1980s.
But the reality was that the principal exposure of U.S. nuclear secrets to China appears to have occurred when Beijing obtained U.S. blueprints for the W-88 miniaturized hydrogen bomb, a Chinese intelligence coup in the mid-1980s on the watch of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
The intelligence loss came at a time when the Reagan-Bush administration was secretly collaborating with communist China on arms shipments to the Nicaraguan contra rebels, an operation so sensitive that Congress and the American people were kept in the dark, even as White House aide Oliver North colluded with Chinese agents.
The Chinese tested their miniaturized warhead in 1992 while George H.W. Bush was president. In other words, it was impossible that the Clinton-Gore administration, which started in 1993, could have been responsible for this security breach.
But the ultimate payoff to Republicans for this twisting of history came in November 2000, when possibly millions of Americans went to the polls determined to throw out the Clinton-Gore crowd for selling nuclear secrets to communist China.
That impression was anchored in the public mind by the House committee's three-volume report, which had selectively presented the case and steered away from evidence that implicated the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
The irony was that these American voters, eager to expel the Democrats for compromising nuclear secrets to China, actually let back in the Republicans who were much more deeply implicated in the offense.
But Lewis Libby had learned an important lesson - fears of foreign dangers could move the American people in a desired direction, as long as the information was carefully tailored and controlled.
It appears that Libby is much, much more than a liar. He's a traitor and all around scumbag. The article goes into much more detail.
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