BUSH´S TRUTH

President Bush has been in search of himself for two and a half years. His voyage of self-discovery began on 30 September 2003. Asked what he knew about senior White House officials anonymously leaking the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, he expressed his earnest desire to help special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald ferret out the perpetrators. "I want to know the truth", he said. "If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business."

Bush didn't stop there. He issued an all-points bulletin requesting help for the prosecutor. "And if people have got solid information, please come forward with it. And that would be people inside the information who are the so-called anonymous sources, or people outside the information – outside the administration. And we can clarify this thing very quickly if people who have got solid evidence would come forward and speak out. And I would hope they would." The day before, the president had sent out his then press secretary, Scott McClellan, to announce that involvement in this incident would be a firing offence: "If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration."

On 5 April 2006, however, in a filing in his perjury and obstruction of justice case against Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief-of-staff to vice-president Dick Cheney, Fitzgerald revealed that Libby had been authorised by the president and vice-president to leak parts of the October 2002 national intelligence estimate (NIE) on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to reporters.

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