Iraqi Nuclear Info Known To Be Flawed When Bush Ordered It Be Leaked...

New York Times DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID BARSTOW April 9, 2006 at 08:27 AM
READ MORE: George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Scooter Libby, Iraq

President Bush's apparent order authorizing a senior White House official to reveal to a reporter previously classified intelligence about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain uranium came as the information was already being discredited by several other officials in the administration, interviews and documents from the time show.

A review of the records and interviews conducted during and after the crucial period in June and July of 2003 also show that what the aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., said he was authorized to portray as a "key judgment" by intelligence officers had in fact been given much less prominence in the most important assessment of Iraq's weapons capability.

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Special Prosecutor Places Cheney At Center Of Concerted Action To "Discredit, Punish Or Seek Revenge" On Iraq War Critic

Washington Post Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer April 8, 2006 at 10:46 PM
READ MORE: George W. Bush, Valerie Plame, Scooter Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald, Iraq, Halliburton, Dick Cheney, CIA

As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" -- using classified information -- to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq.

Bluntly and repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Citing grand jury testimony from the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald fingered Cheney as the first to voice a line of attack that at least three White House officials would soon deploy against former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Cheney, in a conversation with Libby in early July 2003, was said to describe Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger the previous year -- in which the envoy found no support for charges that Iraq tried to buy uranium there -- as "a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife," CIA case officer Valerie Plame.

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