- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The
White House denied on Monday that President Bush's top political adviser,
Karl Rove, was behind a leak of secret information apparently aimed at
discrediting a vocal critic of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
-
- The controversy centers on the public disclosure that
the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame, was an
undercover CIA operative specializing in weapons of mass destruction.
-
- White House spokesman Scott McClellan said he had spoken
to Rove about the allegations and was assured that it was "simply
not true" that Rove had anything to do with the leak.
-
- McClellan pledged the White House would cooperate with
the Justice Department if it investigated the leak, even as some Democrats
called for a special counsel to be appointed to lead the probe.
-
- "This administration has played politics with national
security for a long time, but this is going too far," retired Gen.
Wesley Clark told Reuters. The Democratic presidential hopeful suggested
an independent commission look into the allegations.
-
- The Justice Department would not say whether it would
investigate the matter.
-
- But a senior Bush administration official said the Justice
Department was conducting a preliminary inquiry to determine whether it
needed to carry out a full investigation.
-
- The official said part of the inquiry was to determine
whether the leak was a violation of law, whether it was a violation of
national security or if it caused any damage.
-
- Then the department will determine whether to go into
a full investigation, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
-
- Wilson, a long-time State Department veteran and former
U.S. ambassador to Gabon, has been a sharp critic of the Bush administration,
accusing it of exaggerating the weapons of mass destruction threat posed
by Saddam Hussein.
-
- Wilson wrote in an article for The New York Times in
July that he went to Niger in February 2002 at the request of the CIA to
assess a report that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger, a charge later
dismissed by the International Atomic Energy Agency as based on forged
documents.
-
- The Niger uranium charge found its way into Bush's State
of the Union speech last January as part of the U.S. case against Saddam,
and only after Wilson went public did the White House admit Bush should
not have included it in the speech.
-
- CIA Director George Tenet took responsibility for not
persuading the White House to drop the Niger charge from the speech, a
controversy that consumed part of the summer.
-
- Now, Tenet reportedly has asked the Justice Department
to look into whether one or more Bush administration officials leaked information
to the news media exposing the secret identity of Wilson's wife.
-
- Wilson said he did not have any knowledge that Rove was
the leaker or authorized the leak. "But I have great confidence that
at a minimum he (Rove) condoned it and certainly did nothing to shut it
down," he told ABC's "Good Morning America."
-
- The fact that Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA operative
was published by a columnist, Robert Novak, shortly after Wilson's article
in The New York Times.
-
- Under the Intelligence Identities and Protection Act,
the unauthorized identification of a CIA operative is a criminal act punishable
by up to 10 years in federal prison.
-
- McClellan said Bush had no patience for such activities
and suggested anyone involved would be fired.
-
- "If anyone has information related to this, they
need to report it to the Department of Justice," he said.
-
- Would Bush want someone like this working on his staff?
-
- "I think I answered that question earlier. No. The
president expects his administration, everyone in his administration, to
adhere to the highest standards of conduct, and that would not be,"
McClellan told reporters.
|