Mr Lawman
Scooter Libby has requested a series of confidential documents to back up his claim that the President himself authorized him to leak confidential information to the press. Among other things, Libby leaked Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent to the press.
Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top aide testified that President Bush authorized the release of parts of a classified report on Iraq to rebut criticism of the case for the 2003 invasion, federal prosecutors disclosed in documents released Thursday.
Valerie Plame, of course, is the wife of Joe Wilson. Seven days before the Vice President’s Chief of Staff outed Mrs. Plame, putting her life and the lives of her fellow operatives in jeopardy, Mr Wilson had embarrassed the White House.
Plame’s husband, a former U.S. ambassador, said the administration had twisted prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.
…After a 2002 CIA-sponsored trip to Africa, Wilson said he had concluded that Iraq did not have an agreement to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger.
Wilson’s report was filed well in advance of the famous State of the Union Address, in which the President claimed that there was proof that Hussein was buying yellowcake from Niger in an attempt to build nuclear weapons. After hearing the State of the Union Address, Wilson released the findings from his Niger trip to the press.
Wilson’s account of a 2002 trip to Niger to investigate the Iraqi uranium allegations “was viewed in the Office of Vice President as a direct attack on the credibility of the vice president (and the president) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq,” special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wrote.
President Bush has long condemned the practice of leaking information:
There also is the issue of Bush’s numerous previous statements, now making their way across the Internet at the speed of a DSL line, about leaking. One of the most popular is from Sept. 30, 2003: “Let me just say something about leaks in Washington. There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. There’s leaks at the executive branch; there’s leaks in the legislative branch. There’s just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.”
There is no evidence that the President specifially authorized the leak of Plame’s identity (though the same cannot be said of Vice President Cheney, who appears to have instructed Libby to make the disclosure) but an even larger issue raises its head with this revelation.
While the President does have authority to de-classify information, there is no evidence that this information was officially de-classified, and certainly no indication that releasing it had any productive purpose for the American people.
Instead, the President seems to be leaking our national intelligence-and putting our national security at risk- for his own political gain.
This from a President who claims to be tough on national security.
