Declassifier-In-Chief:"insight into the president's character"

[dajoki]

Slate
http://www.slate.com/id/2139533

Declassifier-In-Chief
By Michael Weiss
Updated Friday, April 7, 2006, at 4:30 PM ET


Bloggers go to town on Scooter Libby's outing of President Bush as declassifier-in-chief. They also have (mostly) hosannas for South Park's cartoon jihad episode.

Declassifer-in-chief: The New York Sun reported Thursday that indicted former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby testified to the grand jury that President Bush in 2003 gave the ultimate go-ahead to authorize leaking to the press "key judgments" of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, detailing among other claims that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure" uranium from Niger. No shocker that the blogosphere is all over the revelation.

Former Clinton speechwriting intern Steven Benan writes at The Carpetbagger: "his wasn't a straightforward example of the president simply declassifying information he no longer needed to keep secret; this was an example of him selectively leaking misleading information as part of a deceptive argument for war." Selective, sure—since the White House was rebutting Joe Wilson's dismissal of an Iraq-Niger "yellowcake" nexus. But misleading? Au contraire, argues conservative Byron York at the National Review blog The Corner: "It should be remembered that when the president decides to make something public, then it can be made public. In the Plame case, there has been much discussion of the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. Would anyone argue that this disclosure was unauthorized?"

However, the question of what was disclosed and how shouldn't be parried, according to the nameless lawyer at The Anonymous Liberal: "So let's assume, for the moment, that Libby's testimony is accurate. That would mean that the President, instead of following normal declassification procedures and publicly releasing a redacted version of the NIE, authorized an aide to present a cherry-picked and manipulated version of that document to a friendly New York Times reporter on deep background. That aide then passed along the highly misleading information and asked that it be attributed to a 'former Hill staffer.' That may not be illegal, but it is sure as hell unethical." However, right-leaning Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters suggests headline writers are the ones trying to have it both ways: "The media had demanded answers to the charges leveled by Wilson and his supporters, and those answers were found in the NIE. The decision to declassify it and publish it came as a result of that demand. Once the decision is made to declassify information, it can be released in any number of ways. This was both leaked and openly presented in the same fortnight."

Andrew Sullivan, long a critic of the administration, considers the news "insight into the president's character": http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/04/declassifying_a.html?promoid=rss_daily_dish "It wasn't Karl Rove's dirty tricks or David Addington's Schmittian ideology or Dick Cheney's 'dark side' here. It's George W. Bush - hard-assed political fighter, micro-managing press coverage of a minor matter, using the privileges of his constitutional position as commander-in-chief to play Washington hardball at a time of war."