"Karl Rove [3], President Bush [4]'s chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides [5] in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration," the National Journal's Murray Waas writes in a revealing article on White House damage-control efforts. The Bush administration's campaign to counter charges that it "misrepresented intelligence information to make the case for war had three major components," Murray reports, "blame the CIA [6] for the use of the Niger information in the president's State of the Union address; discredit and undermine Joseph Wilson [7]; and make sure that the public did not learn that the president had been personally warned that the intelligence assessments he was citing about the aluminum tubes might be wrong."