http://news.ft.com/cms/s/73182b30-0f4c-11da-8b31-00000e2511c8.htmlSomebody is lying. So wrote Terry Neal, a Washington Post reporter, on July 25 2005. He was writing about one of the strangest stories to engulf the White House since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. It is the story of an official investigation into who leaked the name of a CIA operative to the media. According to a 1982 law, that kind of leak would be illegal. Two prominent names have emerged in the investigation of the leak – Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, and Lewis Libby, vice-president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.
The investigation appears now to be heading towards rapid conclusion. If the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, finds that either Mr Rove or Mr Libby or both violated the law, they would face criminal charges, and the Bush administration would find itself enmeshed in a scandal of dimensions that are already being compared to the Nixon-era Watergate scandal.
According to recent opinion polls, including an August 7 poll in Newsweek magazine, the American people are increasingly of the view that Mr Rove, whom Mr Bush described as the “architect” of his 2004 re-election, may be guilty of unethical or illegal behaviour in connection with the leak.
Much is still not known about Mr Fitzgerald’s investigation – he has insisted on absolute secrecy – but what is known suggests that the Bush administration is engaged in a two-front war: one to cover up its blunders in the lead-up to the Iraq war based on the mistaken assumption that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed “weapons of mass destruction”, and the other to protect the leaker. The two fronts are now unmistakeably linked.
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