Trial in former Cheney aide's leak case begins

Jan 16, 2007, 16:00 GMT

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.