March 7 (Bloomberg) -- What the I. Lewis Libby verdict shows beyond a reasonable doubt is that the first instinct of the White House when caught doing something wrong is to lie.

From the false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, to Abu Ghraib, to Katrina, Walter Reed Hospital and the purging of eight U.S. attorneys, the urge to cover-up is reflexive and immediate. They bet they'll never be found out, and most times they aren't.

That's because it takes a village to expose the truth -- subpoenas, a special prosecutor, congressional investigations, investigative journalism, pictures and smoking guns. Against a powerful White House, which until recently was enabled by a complacent Republican Congress, no such village was likely.

But yesterday, the truth was finally catching up with the White House on three stages. As Libby's wife, Harriet, sobbed in court when the jury foreman answered guilty to four of five counts of lying, stories were finally coming out about grievously wounded soldiers returning to Walter Reed Hospital only to be ignored in filthy facilities and U.S. attorneys being fired for political reasons.

In some ways, the more shocking of the two dramas before Congress was about the treatment of soldiers the administration pretends to care so much about. Say a word about bringing them home and you're a traitor who wants to abandon the troops. Send them off without training or armor, and bring them back to poorly staffed, decrepit and vermin-infested Walter Reed hospital, the crown jewel of the military system, and you're a patriot.

Tales of Horror

Soldiers and their families are lined up to tell tales of their horrid treatment. One soldier with his brain shot up and an eye missing testified that he was given a map and told to find his way from the hospital to a residence on the grounds for continuing care -- only to languish there for several weeks.

Some are stonewalling. Representative Henry Waxman had to issue a subpoena to legally compel Major General George Weightman, who outsourced much of the patient care, to appear.

As for the purge of U.S. attorneys, it looked as if President George W. Bush's attorney general would get away with saying all eight were let go because it was time for a change. As questions mounted, Justice Department officials ham-handedly blamed the attorneys themselves for poor performance.

The attorneys began to punch back, and a somnolent Congress heard. One, Bud Cummins, in Little Rock, Arkansas, presented an e-mail he sent to five other prosecutors after he got a call from a Justice Department official. If former prosecutors were going to talk to the press, that would be seen as ``a major escalation of the conflict meriting some kind of unspecified form of retaliation,'' Cummins wrote about the conversation. These officials, he added, would ``pull their gloves off.''

Just Say Yes

Most of the fired prosecutors have similar stories to tell. The San Diego prosecutor just happened to send a Republican congressman, Randy ``Duke'' Cunningham, to prison.

Another was cleared out to make room for an aide to Karl Rove. Yet another testifying yesterday didn't roll over for two members of Congress who are never supposed to contact a prosecutor, much less lean on one.

After New Mexico prosecutor David Iglesias didn't respond to a call from Republican Representative Heather Wilson asking about an investigation of Democratic construction executives, the pressure ratcheted up. Republican Senator Pete Domenici phoned and when Iglesias said he didn't think there would be indictments before November, when the election was to take place, Domenici said, ``I'm sorry to hear that.'' The next thing he knows, he's gone.

A Magical Place

A lot of this went on because people working in the White House with its unique theory of an all-powerful executive, came to feel like demigods. A lowly 30-year-old aide inside has more swagger than most Cabinet secretaries.

Libby would have never lied if he didn't think he was doing Vice President Dick Cheney's bidding inside the protective bubble of the White House.

While some flunky at Justice may lose his job, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is similarly invulnerable, as Bush's hand-picked enabler. So far Gonzales has only admitted that the changes in law enforcement didn't go ``smoothly enough.''

Military generals, a few of whom have lost their jobs, have less protection, even though some possess trickle-down swagger as enablers of Bush's war.

Does He Do Windows?

An unapologetic Lieutenant General Kevin Kiley, now surgeon general of the Army and in charge of Walter Reed from 2002 to 2004, should have to spend a night in Building 18. When asked how such squalid conditions could be ignored at the wards when they were across the street from his beautiful house on the park-like grounds of the hospital, he responded haughtily that he ``doesn't review barracks.'' He might not do windows either.

It's not that Libby shouldn't have been convicted, but that he shouldn't have been alone in the docket. What about Rove, who now admits he spread the word about former Ambassador Joseph Wilson being sent by his CIA agent wife on a mission to Africa? He's still flying high. The Bushes bestowed a rare privilege on Rove by going to his house in Washington for a private dinner last Saturday night. This while the Libbys waited for a verdict.

And what about the guy Libby took the fall for, according to one of the jurors speaking from in front of the courthouse? Cheney isn't saying. He's retreating to the undisclosed location of his mind, issuing a statement as his closest aide heads home with a weeping wife to face two young children that he's ``saddened for Scooter and his family.'' Cheney ``plans to have no further comment.''

We learned a few things about the inscrutable vice president from the trial. He's not unmindful of his reputation. For a month, Cheney spent almost as much time waging a war on Wilson, who put the lie to his claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, as he spent on the war on terror.

Cheney checked almost hourly on which reporters had been fed the information and which ones were biting. If Cheney had half the anger at the bad intelligence that got us into this godforsaken war as he did at Wilson for exposing one part of the lie, he's not showing it. Maybe because he would only be getting mad at himself.

(Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House'' and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: March 7, 2007 09:04 EST