Cheney's Involvement in lPlameGate Deepens (Like the Stench)

From the Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson:

THE NEWS that Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff was the second possible source in the leaking of the identity of a CIA agent to Time magazine elevates the scandal to a whole new level. It is bad enough for Karl Rove to be accused of being a leaker, since he is President Bush’s chief political strategist.

But if Time’s story holds, I. Lewis Libby’s involvement represents an even more insidious abuse of power. The Bush administration is being accused of leaking the name of Valerie Plame in retribution for a New York Times op-ed article written by her husband, diplomat Joseph Wilson. Wilson wrote that he never found any evidence in a 2002 trip to Africa, contrary to claims made by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address, that Saddam Hussein was procuring uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons.

Bush would invade Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that were never found. But Libby, Cheney, and the other influential right-wing hard-liners, such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, saw their dreams come true. Back in the administration of the senior President Bush, Cheney was defense secretary and Libby and Wolfowitz were two of his aides who, after the first Gulf War left Saddam in power, drafted a document advocating ‘‘preemptive’’ war against possible threats.