Washington - Jury selection began Tuesday in the criminal
trial of US Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide, who is
charged with lying during an investigation into how a CIA operative's
name ended up in US media.
The case of I Lewis Libby is expected to highlight how President
George W Bush's administration tried to influence prominent
Washington journalists after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq failed
to deliver evidence that the regime had weapons of mass destruction.
Cheney was expected to testify in defence of his former chief of
staff at the Washington trial. He would be the first sitting US vice
president to testify in a criminal trial.
Prosecutors began investigating after the wife of a former US
diplomat who criticized the administration's arguments for war was
identified as a CIA analyst in a 2003 newspaper column. Publicly
exposing an intelligence agent can be a crime under US law.
Libby, a suspected source of the leak, was indicted in 2005 on
charges of perjury and obstructing prosecutors and a grand jury
investigating the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Libby has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which do not actually
allege that he was the source of the leak.
Plame's husband Joseph Wilson claims that his wife's cover was
blown in retaliation for his criticism of the Bush administration's
arguments for invading Iraq.
Shortly before his wife's name appeared in print, Wilson had
written a newspaper article that discounted one of the Bush
administration's key arguments used to justify the war - that the
Iraqi regime sought to obtain yellowcake uranium from the African
country of Niger.
Opening arguments in the trial were expected at the start of next
week. The trial is expected to last about six weeks.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
AlJan 16th, 2007 - 17:32:47
He has to be guilty because this is a one-of-a-kind case during the Bush administration's continuing disregard of the law. More administration and congressional people have not been indicted because the administration and the Republican Congress did not take action against their own.
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