25 June 2004	Friday	06 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425

WASHINGTON, June 24: President George W. Bush was questioned for 70 minutes on Thursday in the investigation into leaks that revealed to the media the name of a CIA agent married to a US ambassador, the White House said.

Investigators are trying to determine the identity of the sources for conservative columnist Robert Novak's revelation in 2002 that ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA agent. Revealing the name of a CIA agent is a crime in the United States.

The Central Intelligence Agency sent Wilson to Niger in 2002 to investigate allegations that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium ore from the country. He said he found no basis for the allegations, used by Bush in his State of the Union address that year.

Wilson has said the leak of his wife's name was intended to punish him for publicly contradicting Bush's assertions that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. On June 3, Bush confirmed that he had met an attorney in connection with the criminal probe into who blew Plame's cover. -AFP