"The administration was paying careful attention to Iraq war critics"

Oct. 28 (Bloomberg) -- The case against I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff who is accused of lying about the leak of a CIA agent's name, describes a three-month White House campaign to discredit a critic of the Iraq war.

Libby, 55, began digging in May 2003 for information on Joseph Wilson, who disputed a key claim President George W. Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq, court papers say. Cheney and others told Libby that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a Central Intelligence Agency employee a month later, the prosecutors say. Her name first appeared in print in July.

``The administration looks like it was paying careful attention to anyone who was a critic of the arguments being made for going to war in Iraq,'' said Stephen Saltzburg, a former Justice Department official and now a professor at George Washington University Law School. ``It's a reminder that we went to war on such bad information.''

The mission against Wilson, as described in a five-count indictment today, involved other White House aides and brought Libby in contact with officials from the State Department, the CIA, and the White House press office. The name of Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser who appeared four times before the grand jury, doesn't appear in the indictment, and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald refused to say if he still might face charges.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=a726D9v9Zf38&refer=top_world_news