WASHINGTON (AP) — Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s CIA-leak inquiry is focusing attention on what long has been a tactic of President George W. Bush’s administration: slash-and-burn assaults on its critics, particularly those opposed to the president’s Iraq war policies.If top officials are indicted, it could erode the administration’s credibility and prove yet another embarrassment to Bush on the larger issue of how he and his national security team marshalled information — much of it later shown to be inaccurate — to support their case for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The grand jury is concluding a 22-month investigation of whether administration officials illegally leaked information disclosing the identity of an undercover CIA officer, Valerie Plame, in an effort to discredit her husband, former diplomat and war critic Joseph Wilson.

Anxiety at the White House increased after Bush adviser Karl Rove’s fourth appearance last week before Fitzgerald’s grand jury, and with a New York Times reporter’s firsthand account of her dealings with I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide.

The piece by reporter Judith Miller also fuelled speculation that Fitzgerald was seeking to determine whether Cheney played a role in a campaign to discredit Wilson.

“The grand jury investigation has the possibility of really shining a light on the credibility of the administration, how officials tried to undermine those who were criticising them and how they then covered up that attempt,” American University political scientist James Thurber said.

“The question of whether the vice president was involved, we’ll probably never know. But it was pretty close to him,” said Thurber. He questioned whether Rove and Libby would have operated “on their own” in discussing Wilson’s wife with reporters.

White House officials have had quiet discussions about what to do if any Bush aides are charged. There is a general expectation that a staffer would resign if indicted.

Wilson wrote a newspaper essay on July 6, 2003, that sought to undermine the administration’s earlier claims that Iraq had sought to buy uranium “yellowcake” from Niger to help it build nuclear bombs.

It came at a difficult time for the president and his aides. The war clearly was not going well, despite Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech two months earlier. And Bush was already reeling from criticism over mentioning the African yellowcake connection — which turned out to be based on faulty British intelligence — in his State of the Union address.

While the president and his top aides refuse to comment now on the investigation, or on any issues surrounding the unfounded Iraq-African uranium claim, they were not so tigh-tlipped in July, 2003.

During a presidential trip to Africa days after Wilson’s article appeared, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice spent nearly an hour with reporters on Air Force One trying to put blame for the faulty State of the Union conclusions on the CIA and its then-director, George Tenet.

Some analysts suggest that any administration plot to undermine Wilson privately only mirrored Bush and Rice’s open efforts to undermine Tenet.

“This is an administration that was trying to play hardball at every level,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution. “And that’s what they were doing with Wilson. And he of course was playing hardball, too. It was an ugly back and forth.”

Plame was named by columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003, as a CIA operative on weapons of mass destruction. Novak wrote that “two senior administration officials” had told him that Plame had suggested her husband, a former ambassador, be sent to Niger in 2002 to check out reports that Saddam Hussein was shopping for uranium.

The reports had no basis in fact, something Wilson reported back to a Bush administration that ignored his conclusions, Wilson later wrote.

In her account in The New York Times, Miller, who spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to speak to the grand jury, wrote that Fitzgerald asked her questions about Cheney. “He asked, for example, if Mr. Libby ever indicated whether Mr. Cheney had approved of his interviews with me or was aware of them,” she wrote.

Such a question could suggest the prosecutor was investigating whether Cheney was

part of a conspiracy to discredit Plame and Wilson. “The answer was no,” Miller wrote.

Bush vowed as recently as July to fire anyone on his staff found to have committed a crime in the CIA-leak matter, but has since completely clammed up.

“I’ve made it very clear to the press that I’m not going to discuss the investigation,” Bush said when asked by a reporter whether he would remove an aide under indictment. “There’s a serious investigation. I’m not going to prejudge the outcome of the investigation.”