Did Scooter Libby, Vice-President Cheney's chief of staff, lie to a grand jury about Valerie Plame and the leaking of her name to the press? If he did, was it retaliation aimed at her husband, Joseph Wilson, who wrote in the New York Times that the allegation that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Niger was false - based, it turned out, on forged documents passed on to Washington and London by the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI? How did it happen that the intelligence services of the US and the UK got the story of Iraq's WMD so badly wrong? Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo provide some clues in three articles in La Repubblica published between 24 and 26 October.

LRB 17 November 2005 | PDF Download