them free rein to examine any site of their choosing. Then, on Dec. 7, 2002, Iraq sent to the United Nations a 12,000-page declaration explaining how its WMD stockpiles had been eliminated. At the time, the Bush administration – and much of the Washington press corps – mocked those efforts as proof that the Iraqis were continuing their WMD cover-up. The U.N. inspections continued into March 2003 when Bush decided to press ahead with war and forced the inspectors to leave. After the invasion, U.S. weapons inspectors also found no WMD and concluded that the Iraqis had been telling the truth. The Plame-gate Affair As the WMD search came up empty in summer 2003, Bush and his inner circle continued their campaign to punish critics and confuse thepublic. The most notorious case was the behind-the-scenes assault on the reputation of former Ambassador Wilson for daring to disclose that Bush had used a false claim in his 2003 State of the Union Address about Iraq obtaining yellowcake uranium from Niger. As administration officials fanned out to disparage Wilson with friendly journalists, several of the leakers – including Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, White House political adviser Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff – also divulged that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA. That leak, which surfaced in a Robert Novak column in the Washington Post on July 14, 2003, destroyed Plame’s CIA career and jeopardized foreign nationals who had collaborated with her covert intelligence network. In September