Bush Scandals Continue To Disappoint
You know, this guy may have poor approval ratings, but I’ve never seen a president whose ’scandals’ were more out in the open. Bush doesn’t run from his decisions. Case in point: the NIE disclosure:
President George W. Bush said he declassified intelligence information on Iraq’s weapons in 2003 in response to critics’ post-invasion questions about whether his administration distorted prewar intelligence.
“After we liberated Iraq, there were questions in people’s minds about the basis on which we made statements,” Bush said in a question-and-answer session Monday before the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. “I wanted people to see what some of those statements were based on. I wanted people to see the truth.”
Testimony by a former White House aide that Bush approved selective leaks of classified information to rebut Iraq war critics has triggered new criticism of Bush on an issue that has already weakened him politically.
Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a grand jury that Cheney told him Bush authorized the disclosure of information from the National Intelligence Estimate, according to court documents made public last week.
It can’t be stressed enough what the documents DID NOT allege:
The documents don’t allege that Bush or Cheney directed anyone to divulge the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose naming in a July 2003 newspaper column prompted a Justice Department investigation. The column was published after Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, wrote a New York Times essay challenging Bush’s rationale for going to war in Iraq.
Hard to play the coverup angle when the president comes right out and says, yeah, I did it, and here’s why…
UPDATE 10:29 p.m.:One of the points of criticism has now completely evaporated, as topsecretk9 points out in the comments. Wording in the court filing by Fitzgerald made it appear that Bush was being less than forthcoming – wording that Fitz has now had to publicly correct because of the false impression it gave (short version: the original wording seemed to suggest that Bush overplayed the emphasis in the NIE on Iraq’s efforts to procure uranium – in fact, that wording was in error)…
Check Drudge. Fitz goofed, big goof….
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/11/AR2006041101440_pf.html
Byron York had the scoop
http://corner.nationalreview.com/06_04_09_corner-archive.asp#094765
Lefty blogs eating crow? NYT’s…any word yet?
I wonder if this information will be on the front page of tomorrow’s KC Star? NOT.
Agreed that Libby, Cheney and Bush were not leaking or declassifying the entirety of the NIE Key Judgements. If they would have done so: for one it would have included, “The Department of Energy [DOE] agrees that reconstitution of the nuclear program is underway but assesses that the tubes probably are not part of the program.)” It was the administration’s claim that the tubes were part of the smoking gun evidence. The “Key Judgements” did not have the uranium claim in it, yet Libby discussed such a claim with Judith Miller. Libby says he was authorized to leak information of the NIE, why bring up the already disproved uranim claims unless he was trying to be intentionally missleading. Even if the uranium/Niger story was true, there was no practicle reason to even mention Wilson, much less Plame. The alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate’s key judgments it was in fact on page 96.
“The Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research (INR)believes that Saddam continues to want nuclear weapons and that available evidence indicates that Baghdad is pursuing at least a limited effort to maintain and acquire nuclear weapon-related capabilities. The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq may be doing so, but INR considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment.” from Global Security excerpts from NIE, – the curious thing about this is that it doesn’t sound anything like the case that the administration was making to the American public.
OCTOBER 2002 – CIA DIRECTLY WARNS WHITE HOUSE: “The CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa.”
OCTOBER 2002 — STATE DEPT. WARNS WHITE HOUSE ON NUKE CHARGES: The State Department’s Intelligence and Research Department dissented from the conclusion in the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD capabilities that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. “The activities we have detected do not … add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquiring nuclear weapons.” INR accepted the judgment by Energy Department technical experts that aluminum tubes Iraq was seeking to acquire, which was the central basis for the conclusion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, were ill-suited to build centrifuges for enriching uranium.
Zola
Move on…dot org.
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1) Bush’s explanation of why he declassified the information was a non-sequitor to the question he was asked (why was the information leaked?). The declassification came approximately ten days after Libby leaked the information (i.e., after the horse had left the barn). The issue is why the NIE was leaked, not why it was declassified after it was leaked.
2) Fitzgerald’s correction is trivial. The essence of the story is that Libby leaked a distorted version of the NIE’s findings: while the report did not place much credence on an aggressive campaign by Iraq to acquire uranium, Libby told the reporters otherwise. Whether the purported case describing Iraqi nuclear ambitions was described as a “key judgment” or merely part of the NIE is a technicality. The broader question is why the administration chose to selectively leak distorted information in an attempt to defend its mistaken cassus belli in advance of a Presidential election.
To counter the lies Joe Wilson told and that the Democrats and MSM were trumpeting.
Legal Declassification is not = Leak.
When a legal declassification follows a leak by ten days, the declassification is somewhat irrelevant.
peter, technicalities are what legal cases are built upon. It’s the legal niceties that make the difference on whether Libby goes to jail or not – obviously, Fitz felt it was important enough to correct the record on, and the Washington Post felt it was important enough to run a correction on.
It may have significance for the Libby trial, but it’s a technicality in the context of the broader questions of how and why intelligence was leaked – sorry if I was unclear –