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US prosecutor asks for Libby jail term of up to three years

A special US prosecutor has asked for former top White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, convicted in a politically-charged CIA leak case, to be jailed for up to three years.

Patrick Fitzgerald made the request on Friday, less than two weeks before Libby is due to be sentenced for his role in a presumed act of political vendetta that illegally ended the career of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame, wife of retired US diplomat Joseph Wilson.

"He has expressed no remorse, no acceptance of responsibility and no recognition that there is anything he should have done differently," Fitzgerald wrote in his sentencing memorandum in a federal court in Washington.

He pointed out that in the course of a four-year investigation that was launched in October 2003, after Plame's name was leaked to the press in connection with an Iraq war debate, "Libby lied about nearly everything that mattered."

Given these circumstances, the prosecutor said the former chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney should be sentenced to between 30 months and 37 months in prison.

The request marks another chapter in a long political scandal that tarnished the reputation of the administration of President George W. Bush and cast another shadow on its argument that the invasion of Iraq was necessary because the country was amassing an illicit arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Plame's name was first disclosed in July 2003 by conservative columnist Robert Novak following her husband's mission to Niger the previous year, during which the former US ambassador tried to verify reports that Iraq was secretly trying to purchase uranium ore there.

After failing to find any evidence of that, Wilson published an article in the New York Times, in which he accused the Bush administration of "exaggerating the Iraqi threat" in order to justify the war.

His assessment undercut an assertion made by Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
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