Criminal Activity

Over the weekend, my wife and I flew to Minnesota to see our son Jeremiah’s performance in Man of La Mancha. It was a great trip, but, along the way, I did something worthy of mentioning in the program for Fools as one of the most foolish things I’ve ever done.

Several months ago, during rehearsal for Beauty and the Beast, I happened to ask Mr. Maybee whatever happened to “the little wonder” from Oklahoma. This was a two-inch switchblade that we rigged to a kaleidoscope as a prop for that play. At any rate, Mr. Maybee gave it to me, since it was in his desk drawer, and I put it into my duffle bag and basically forgot about it. Can you guess what happened? I went through airport security with “the little wonder” still stashed in my duffle bag! It was completely inadvertent; even I wouldn’t be so stupid as to willfully bring a weapon on board a plane. So the men in blue were summoned to write me a ticket for my checkpoint violation, joining the ranks of other fools who forgot about their box cutters and pocket knives when they went to board a plane.

Over the weekend, the indictment of “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, was announced. He is accused of lying to a grand jury, which heard testimony and examined evidence related to the leak to the news media of the name of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame. The story is a complicated one, but here’s the gist of it: Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, took a trip to Niger, a west African nation, to determine if Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase yellow cake uranium in order to use it in a nuclear weapons program. When Wilson later wrote an op-ed piece in the NY Times accusing President Bush of lying in his 2003 State of the Union address in which he included that detail as part of the case for war against Saddam Hussein. He also claimed that the Vice President’s office had sent him on this mission. In reality, his wife, who was working at a CIA desk job at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, VA, got the CIA to send him. This news was reported by columnist Bob Novak, and the investigation which ensued attempted to determine who leaked Plame’s identity to the press, and if, in so doing, they were guilty of a crime against the 1982 Espionage Act. This law specifically forbids the disclosing of a spy’s identity if they have operated undercover within the past five years, a time frame within which Ms. Plame was not engaged in covert activity. So no crime was committed until the grand jury was convened, and only one person has been officially accused of the crime of perjury.

It has been amazing to watch how the media turns molehills into mountains. One indictment—an accusation, mind you, not a conviction—and the media labels the Bush administration as “full of corruption.” A few soldiers make a terrorist prisoner wear women’s underwear on his head and make him wear a dog collar, and this is extrapolated to mean that there is a policy of torture approved by the Defense department.

I don’t know that anyone would consider me corrupt, evil, or a criminal because I happened to forget that the “little wonder” was in my carryon bag. I also find it difficult to imagine that fair-minded people would believe that this whole Plame/CIA leak affair is going to bring down the Bush Presidency a la Watergate and President Nixon. After all, Libby told the truth when he said that Wilson got his orders to go to Niger not from the Vice President’s office but from his wife, an insider at the CIA. Then again, Jesus himself was indicted and convicted for telling the truth that he was the Son of God. The righteous are always condemned by the unrighteous, and the demands for crucifixion still ring loudly and clearly.