in this issue

THERE WAS A delicious sense of historical irony on the front page of the New York Times Oct. 31: While the nation's paper of record still hasn't done an honest report on the indictment of I. Lewis Libby, it finally reported, 41 years late, that the intelligence reports that led to the start of the Vietnam War were fabricated.

Think about it: In 1964, after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which then-president Lyndon Johnson used to start a war that killed 50,000 Americans, a few journalists (notably I.F. Stone) argued that the incident was dubious at best. They were largely dismissed by the mainstream media, which went along uncritically with Johnson's bogus intelligence and helped build the case for the escalating war.

Over the past few decades, a few reporters (Jonathan Kwitny's book Endless Enemies comes to mind) exposed the fact that the supposed North Vietnamese attack on US destroyers never happened. Now it's clear that the situation was even worse: The administration deliberately faked the intelligence data.

Sound familiar?

The entire Iraq War was based not only on lies but on deliberately falsified intelligence data – and now it's becoming clear how far the Bush administration was willing to go to crush anyone who tried to tell the truth. And yet the news media have still largely treated this as a single indictment of a single person.

Here's the lead I would have written:

"The vice president of the United States and President George W. Bush's top political advisor engaged in a conspiracy to disclose the classified identity of a CIA operative in an effort to punish her husband, who blew the whistle on the lies behind the Iraq invasion, a federal indictment shows."

That's exactly true. Read the indictment for yourself. It says Cheney knew, Rove knew, and Libby knew – and I can't believe Libby leaked that sort of explosive info to the press without telling his boss.

This ought to be the beginning of the end for the whole Bush crew and agenda (although, as Paul Krugman wrote Oct. 31, that won't happen "until journalists ask themselves: what did we know, when did we know it and why didn't we tell the public?")

Meanwhile, the old antiwar gang from the Vietnam era was out at Golden Gate Park Oct. 30 celebrating the life of Chet Helms. Maybe not the end of an era.

Tim Redmond

tredmond@sfbg.com