Washington ? Prosecutors told the jury Tuesday that former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby made up a ludicrous lie to save his job during the CIA leak investigation. But defense attorneys said he behaved like an innocent man with a bad memory.

The federal court jurors remained alert and attentive as four lawyers summarized the Libby case in more than six hours of closing arguments. They displayed lists, documents and testimony transcripts and played video and audio clips to help jurors concentrate as they reviewed 14 days of evidence in repetitive, almost line-by-line detail.

The arguments built to a late afternoon crescendo as defense attorney Theodore Wells, whose voice rose and fell dramatically, choked back a sob as he asked the jurors to acquit his client no matter how they “may feel about the war in Iraq or the Bush administration.”

Wells was followed by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, speaking a mile-a-minute and lacing his rebuttal to the defense with sarcasm. Fitzgerald said that, by lying, Libby “threw sand in the eyes of the FBI investigators and the grand jury” trying to find out if someone leaked classified information that could endanger lives.

This artist rendering shows I. Lewis Scooter Libby's attorney Theodore V. Wells, standing at right, during closing arguments in Libby's perjury trial Tuesday at federal court in Washington. District Judge Reggie Walton is seated at center, and Libby is at far right.

Wells and Fitzgerald clashed over how important Libby and his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, considered CIA operative Valerie Plame, wife of prominent Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson. The whole case began with a Robert Novak column on July 14, 2003, which disclosed that Plame worked at CIA and that she suggested Wilson go to Niger in 2002.

Wilson said his trip debunked a report that Iraq was seeking uranium for nuclear weapons. He said Cheney would have heard Wilson’s conclusions long before President Bush cited the report as a justification for war, because Cheney’s questions had prompted the trip.

Wells said Plame’s job wasn’t the sort of information someone would remember months after hearing it if he’d just spent the intervening time basking on a beach. “All of us misremember things,” Wells said. “It’s happened to everybody.”