Today’s guilty verdicts are not solely about the acts of one individual.

This trial provided a troubling picture of the inner workings of the Bush Administration. The testimony unmistakably revealed – at the highest levels of the Bush Administration – a callous disregard in handling sensitive national security information and a disposition to smear critics of the war in Iraq.

If the Vice President were passing on a reported rumor, and not an official channel, thatwould be different in terms of decisionmaking for the prosecutor? We tried to ascertain how this was done.

If Congress does something on this, we will do what is appropriate.

Do you believe this investigation changes the relationship with reporters? What Libby was doing was not whistleblowing - the reporters were a witness to a potential crime. There is a difference. By placing the information in this case behind reporters, there was no other way to proceed in this case but to talk with the reporters in question. (CHS notes: They cannot be used as shields for guilt or innocence of conduct, in other words.)

Trial evidence? The judge made a ruling that the case would not be tried based on Valerie Plame Wilson's status. her relationship with the CIA was classified - I have 100% confidence in this information.

If reporters were eyewitnesses to a potential crime — we could not have gotten to the bottom of this without some discussion with those reporters.

It is worth noting, perhaps most important, that there is a whole array of other pending judicial matters that, either directly or implicitly, entail accusations against high Bush officials, including the president himself, of engaging in serious criminal behavior. Last August, a federal district judge, Anna Diggs Taylor, ruled that President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program violated not only the Constitution but also FISA, a criminal statute making it a federal felony to eavesdrop on Americans without judicial warrants and imposing punishments of five years' imprisonment for each offense and fines up to $10,000.

Also last fall, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Hamdan case rejected the Bush administration's principal defense for its violations of the Geneva Conventions not only with regard to military commissions, but also generally. By holding that Common Article 3 of the Conventions applies to all detainees, and by emphasizing that a failure to treat detainees in compliance with Common Article 3 constitutes "war crimes," the Supreme Court effectively found that Bush officials have authorized and engaged in what clearly could be construed to be felony violations of the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. sec. 2241), which makes it a federal crime to violate war treaties such as the Geneva Conventions. Though the administration succeeded in inducing the Republican-led Congress to enact the Military Commissions Act as a shield against retroactive criminal liability, the constitutionality of that law, and the efficacy of the criminal shield provisions, are far from certain. (my emphasis in bold)

The stunning, vehement verdict in the Scooter Libby trial — that he lied, repeatedly, big time — isn’t really about Scooter Libby at all. It is about how and why we went to war in Iraq, and about how Vice President Dick Cheney got us there. Loyalty is everything to President George W. Bush, and I don’t expect him to march into Cheney’s office to demand a resignation. But the veep is a liabiity as never before, and even Bush has to know that.

But the biggest burden will fall on Cheney himself. His own Hobbesian view of the world — that life is nasty, brutish and short — is becoming all too personal. He had to be relieved that Prosecutor Fitzgerald described his investigation as "inactive." That would seem to mean that Cheney is in no legal jeopardy.

Unless Libby, facing serious jail time (and he might well be, given the breadth of the verdict), decides to change his story and tell us something about Cheney we don’t know—and that the president of the United States won’t want to hear.

Cheney, say those who know him, has always had a Hobbesian view of life. The world is a dangerous place; war is the natural state of mankind; enemies lurk. The national-security state must be strong, vigilant and wary. Cheney believes that America’s military and intelligence establishments were weakened by defeat in Vietnam and the wave of scandals that followed in Watergate in the ’70s and Iran-contra in the ’80s. He did not regard as progress the rise of congressional investigating committees, special prosecutors and an increasingly adversarial, aggressive press. Cheney is a strong believer in the necessity of government secrecy as well as more broadly the need to preserve and protect the power of the executive branch.