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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kevin Rose who wrote (735867)	4/7/2006 10:35:46 AM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

DUBYA CAN'T LEAK And this "leak" wasn't a leak in any case. A "leak" is the unauthorized release of government information. The leak of classified information is a crime. But according to Scooter Libby, the former chief of staff to the vice president who gave the information from the NIE to a reporter, he only released it because he was authorized to do so by the president himself. Constitutionally, the authority to declare documents "classified" resides with the president. So, under the terms of an executive order first drafted in 1982, he can declassify a document merely by declaring it unclassified. The language of the executive order reads as follows: "Information shall be declassified or downgraded by the official who authorized the original classification, if that official is still serving in the same position . . . [or] a supervisory official." In the executive branch, the president is the ultimate "supervisory official." So in other words, what Podhoretz is arguing is that a person who ulitimatey determines what is and isn't classified does not by definition have the ability to leak unclassified information. As soon as that person (the President in this case) decides to tell the public, it become declassified by nature. This does lend itself to an odd situation for someone like Fitzgerald to be in. How can he argue that the President authorizied the leak of classified information, when the President himself has the ability to declassify that very information? A President can simply say (by authorization from the constitution) that this information is no longer classified... go ahead and tell the press. This was similar to what I wrote yesterday. Of course people like Scooter Libby were told by the President and Vice President what information could and couldn't be given to the press. It ultimately is their (Executive leaders) call (in most cases) what is and isn't classified and what the public should and should not know. More to the point, much of the information from the NIE reports was already declassified and given to the Senate several months before Scooter Libby supposedly 'leaked' the same information. On Oct. 7, 2002, nine months before Bush's supposed "leak," the administration released an unclassified version of the very same NIE at the urging of Senate Democrats. And in early 2003, reporters hostile to the administration (primarily John Judis and Spencer Ackerman of The New Republic) were being told all sorts of things about the still-classified portions of the NIE. Once again... the same critics who got much of their food for fodder from illegally leaked classified information, would now like the hold the President to the fire over 'leaking' of information that wasn't even classified. It's hypocrisy at it's finest folks, and would be funny if it wasn't so sad. But the mentality out there seems to be that information damaging to the President should be fair game, classified or not. On the other hand, information that the President would like to get out (even declassified) has no business being reported. It's as if what certain members of the Press 'want' to report is more important than reporting objectively. Which is why, to this day, they still see Wilson as some sort of hero, when in fact he is a proven liar. Fitzgerald did not indict Libby or anybody else on those grounds. Even so, there's been a lot of harrumphing about the idea that the White House might have sought to discredit Wilson at all - that somehow doing such a thing was manifestly horrible. But Wilson had claimed that he had inside knowledge that the White House knew Saddam had never sought to purchase uranium and that it went ahead and told a ####-and-bull story anyway - that, in other words, Bush had deliberately lied us into war. That charge was so explosive that the Bush administration had no choice but to answer it in some fashion. By authorizing the release of some classified material to a reporter, Bush was fighting back against a slander. And slander it was, no more and no less. The Senate Intelligence Committee specifically said Wilson came back from Niger and offered up some information suggesting Saddam had been pursuing nuclear material in Niger in 1999. Wilson's appalling lies were revealed in 2004. And yet, here we are, in 2006, fighting the same old battles. Is it any wonder that nobody trusts the media anymore?