America/Conor O'Clery: The row over the Bush administration's pre-war claims is getting dirtier. A respected former diplomat, an anti-war Senator and a foreign correspondent all have been the targets of smears that appear to have originated from the White House.
The claim in January by President Bush that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from Africa was blown out of the water by the diplomat James Wilson when he went public in the New York Times on July 6th to say he had found the story "highly unlikely" a year earlier.
The White House then had to admit it had been wrong to include the 16-word sentence about uranium in Mr Bush's State of the Union Address.
Now Mr Wilson is saying that for speaking out his family has become the subject of a dirty tricks campaign by White House officials. The diplomat told NBC News that the Bush administration deliberately leaked his wife's identity as a covert CIA operative, damaging her future career and compromising past missions. The White House strongly denies the charge but Wilson is not convinced.
"It's a shot across the bow to those who might step forward, those unnamed analysts who said they were pressured by the White House, for example, would think twice about having their own families' names dragged through this particular mud," he said.
His wife, Valerie Plame, was 'outed' in a column by conservative writer Bob Novak, who credited two "senior administration officials" for the information. Wilson told NBC that a number of other articles had been written attacking him for telling the truth.
"It's not to intimidate me," he said. "What I'm most worried about is it is probably intended to intimidate others and keep them from stepping forward."
Wilson, who is regarded as something of a hero inside the State Department for risking his life to shelter Americans at the US embassy in Baghdad during the first Gulf War, is now fighting back. He has gone on television to pour scorn on the way the Bush administration used the fake documents that were the basis of the uranium story and to question its future credibility.
He points out that Italian Panorama editor Carlo Rossella, who first got the documents, rejected them because "they smelled". The Niger crest on the letterhead was wrong, the documents were dated July 1999 but referred to an agreement in June 2000, and they bore the signature of a Niger foreign minister who had left office a decade earlier.
On Thursday, the former ambassador appeared on Comedy Central's hilarious spoof 11 o'clock news to poke fun at the administration. He said he was still in favour in the White House - and produced as evidence a "personal" letter he had just received from Vice President Dick Cheney - a mass-mailing plea for the recipient to give $1,000 to the Bush re-election campaign.
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who says the outing of Ambassador Wilson's wife "may be criminal, and that, quite frankly, is as serious as it gets in this town," claims that he too is the subject of a White House dirty tricks campaign.
The anti-war Illinois Senator accused the Bush administration of trying to have him kicked off the Senate Intelligence Committee. Speaking on the Senate floor, he accused officials of a continuing pattern of news leaks depicting him as unfit for membership of the panel and designed to intimidate critics of the intelligence hype over Iraq.
Mr Durbin has been calling for a Senate investigation into the intelligence that was used to justify war. Any Senator who questioned administration policy or its use of intelligence information should be prepared for the worst, he said. "The White House is going to turn to you and attack you. They are going to question your patriotism."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan dismissed the charge as "absolute nonsense", saying it was not the way the White House or its press office operated and "is not my style".
However, the Senator backed up his claim by saying that reporters who called his office on Friday last stated that an anonymous White House official had accused him of disclosing classified information in revealing the name of the national security aide, Robert Joseph, who was involved in the preparation of the speech.
He also was alleged to have included classified information in a Senate speech last week when he said the US had identified 550 sites it suspected may have been used for weapons of mass destruction. Durbin denied the claims, and his office produced copies of UN statements to back up his assertion that the information on sites had been declassified in June.
The third victim of smear tactics was ABC news correspondent, Jeffrey Kofman. A report on his personal life - Kofman is openly gay - appeared on the Internet's popular Drudge Report shortly after the reporter had filed a story on low troop morale in Iraq. His report angered the Pentagon, particularly a comment from a soldier that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign.
"ABC NEWS REPORTER WHO FILED TROOP COMPLAINTS STORY IS GAY, CANADIAN," said the headline on the Drudge Report, which included a link to a profile of Kofman in the gay magazine, The Advocate.
The publisher of the site, Matt Drudge, who often hypes up conservative news, later told the Washington Post that "someone in the White House communications shop tipped me" about the Advocate profile.
Scott McClellan said that if anyone on his staff did it, "they would no longer be working for me". Columnist Maureen Dowd said in the New York Times that the crude slur indicated a resurgent McCarthyism, "making character assassination fashionable again on the Potomac". Drudge later dropped the reference to sexual orientation in the headline so it read "ABC NEWS REPORTER WHO FILED TROOP COMPLAINTS STORY IS CANADIAN".
The real smear, it seems, was that he isn't American. Kofman, who said he was willing to accept the White House denial, quipped to the Toronto Globe and Mail, "I tried to hide the Canadian-ness... My darkest secret has been revealed."
Jayson Blair, the former New York Times "reporter" who resigned in May after being exposed for plagiarism and fraud, didn't have to wait long to land a couple of well-paying assignments from other publications. Blair, whose actions caused an upheaval at the Times, will write about workplace pressures for the women's magazine Jane, according to the New York Post. And Esquire magazine has asked Blair, who in the New York Times often claimed to write from locations he never visited, to review a movie about Stephen Glass, another famous fabricator who made up stories for the New Republic. But will he actually go to the cinema?