A glimpse under the hood of that "well-oiled machine"

The Bush/Cheney junta: obsessed with turf, secrecy, and self-image.

At the Bush White House described in the Libby trial, news media advisers were frozen out of decisions about how to respond to a crisis, colleagues kept from one another which reporters they had talked with, and the president declassified parts of a highly significant national security document without the knowledge of his chief of staff.

"They seem to have created all these little monopolies, all these little 'need-to-knows.' It creates cleavages internally," said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, a research group promoting access to government records that has combed through the Libby trial exhibits.

Blanton said the evidence presented at the trial that ended Tuesday in Libby's conviction demonstrates that "this administration's obsession with secrecy" extends to the way Bush's aides interact with each other. In particular, Blanton said, "the Cheney office seems to have raised information-hoarding . . . to a real fine art."

Testimony from eight current and former administration officials, combined with handwritten notes and other evidence, also made clear that a White House that likes to profess an indifference to its public image has at times been quite the opposite on the inside.

Time and again, witnesses gave fresh details of a zeal to manipulate and monitor the administration's portrayal in the news media that reached the top echelons of the White House.

At one point, early in the summer of 2003, Cheney personally directed his staff to watch every television news show that mentioned him, in addition to its customary clipping of published articles, his former public affairs director testified. And witnesses provided a vivid window into rivalries between the vice president's office and other parts of the White House -- and between the West Wing and agencies responsible for diplomacy and national security.

Early on, it seemed that the kneecapping that Cheney and his proxies inflicted on Ambassador Wilson was motivated by fears that the president's credibility was under attack just as it was becoming clear that no WMD were going to be found in Iraq. In retrospect, though, it's pretty clear that Cheney saw Wilson's op ed as a personal slight. It was Cheney's credibility that Cheney cared about. And when Cheney cares about something, you'd best get out of the way.

They could have ignored Wilson's piece and the whole thing would have been little more than a footnote. Or, they could have simply and factually denied that Wilson was dispatched to Africa on Cheney's order, undermining some of Wilson's credibility. Instead, they decided to turn this into something personal, attacking this as a "junket" informed by nepotism. Cheney lost face and ordered his loyal capos to whack someone. Now, Libby's legal defense fund is going to have to kick into high gear again.