Excellent article today in the Washington Post which explains why President Bush was right to authorize the declassification of the Niger information.
PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do. But the administration handled the release clumsily, exposing Mr. Bush to the hyperbolic charges of misconduct and hypocrisy that Democrats are leveling.
Rather than follow the usual declassification procedures and then invite reporters to a briefing — as the White House eventually did — Vice President Cheney initially chose to be secretive, ordering his chief of staff at the time, I. Lewis Libby, to leak the information to a favorite New York Times reporter. The full public disclosure followed 10 days later. There was nothing illegal or even particularly unusual about that; nor is this presidentially authorized leak necessarily comparable to other, unauthorized disclosures that the president believes, rightly or wrongly, compromise national security. Nevertheless, Mr. Cheney’s tactics make Mr. Bush look foolish for having subsequently denounced a different leak in the same controversy and vowing to “get to the bottom” of it.
The affair concerns, once again, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his absurdly over-examined visit to the African country of Niger in 2002. Each time the case surfaces, opponents of the war in Iraq use it to raise a different set of charges, so it’s worth recalling the previous iterations. Mr. Wilson originally claimed in a 2003 New York Times op-ed and in conversations with numerous reporters that he had debunked a report that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Niger and that Mr. Bush’s subsequent inclusion of that allegation in his State of the Union address showed that he had deliberately “twisted” intelligence “to exaggerate the Iraq threat.” The material that Mr. Bush ordered declassified established, as have several subsequent investigations, that Mr. Wilson was the one guilty of twisting the truth. In fact, his report supported the conclusion that Iraq had sought uranium.
[…]As Mr. Fitzgerald pointed out at the time of Mr. Libby’s indictment last fall, none of this is particularly relevant to the question of whether the grounds for war in Iraq were sound or bogus. It’s unfortunate that those who seek to prove the latter would now claim that Mr. Bush did something wrong by releasing for public review some of the intelligence he used in making his most momentous decision.
And as Andrew McCarthy established, Bush was not the first to declassify information to bolster their case:
In many instances, it would be nice (for diplomatic, strategic, investigative, or other purposes) if information could be kept under wraps. But governance is freighted with politics ? which means it is beset by misinformation, half-truths, and the inaccuracies you get in a bumptious partisan environment, fueled by 24-hour news channels and a press whose default state is frenzy. Consequently, when misinformation approaches a tipping point in the court of public opinion, it is often to the greater good for a president to disclose some sensitive, accurate information so the public is not led astray.
Classic example of this? After the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed in 1998, the Clinton Administration retaliated, in part, by bombing the al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Almost immediately, President Clinton was attacked politically: we had taken out a mere aspirin factory, Sudan was not a threat to us, it was a gratuitous act of American aggression, etc.
So what did the Clinton Administration do? Exactly what it should have done. It had intelligence officials leak to the media previously undisclosed, previously classified information which put President Clinton?s decision in sensible context. Besides anonymous leakers, the Administration later sent its top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, to provide ? selectively ? some of the available intelligence, so the public would understand why President Clinton?s actions had been justified. Here?s how the Washington Post reported it on January 23, 1999:
While U.S. intelligence officials disclosed shortly after the missile attack that they had obtained a soil sample from the El Shifa site that contained a precursor of VX nerve gas, Clarke said that the U.S. government is ?sure? that Iraqi nerve gas experts actually produced a powdered VX-like substance at the plant that, when mixed with bleach and water, would have become fully active VX nerve gas.Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa’s current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.
Given the evidence presented to the White House before the airstrike, Clarke said, the president ?would have been derelict in his duties if he didn’t blow up the facility.?
The press was not very supportive of the Sudan bombing ? it was, after all, a use of American military power. But they liked Clinton, so the selective disclosure of previously classified information by Clinton officials was treated matter-of-factly ? as it should have been. The story was about the information, not the leak.To the contrary, they abhor Bush, so the Libby story is about the leak ? not the NIE information. That information, of course, puts Iraq operations ? which the media also oppose ? in more accurate context. Obviously, if your champion is Joseph Wilson, you?d much rather be talking about leaks than substance.
That?s the way the game is played now ? and it stinks.
Recall how the left and the MSM constantly harp on the fact that Bush is too secretive. Now they are upset because he wanted classified information put out into the world, the same information that helped him make the decision to go to war.
As for the shrill cries about a leak from the White House, it can be summed up quite succinctly. IT WAS NOT A LEAK. The information was declassified therefore there was no leak. Not too complicated is it?
So what exactly is the controversy?
- Bush authorized the declassification of classified material, so no leak
- The information that was released proved that Joe Wilson was lying since he reported that Iraq HAD contacted Niger about uranium but went to the MSM stating exactly the opposite.
- Bush had a duty to refute Wilson’s statements
In the end this is another one of the lefts smear campaigns that they throw on the wall hoping it will stick.? This one missed the mark once again and make them look even more foolish.
Other’s Blogging;
In the end this is another one of the lefts smear campaigns that they throw on the wall hoping it will stick. This one missed the mark once again and make them look even more foolish.
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Curt,
The left is screaming mad right now about that editorial. It is kind of disquieting to the waves in the echo chamber, don’t you know.
Seriously, I say some unflattering things about a lot of different people but the only ones who go postal on my comments are lefties.
I even emailed one of the more right leaning people and asked him to tone it down – he sent back a courteous reply, agreed I had a point and has been very civil since.
That’s a clue to the left who actually want to communicate. Too many are clue-proof(tm) these days.
The niger claim was not throughly repudiated, Wilson’s own report verified that they were approched in 1999 by the Iraqi’s.
The news story is a piece of crap that is to be expected by the Post since most everything that comes from that rag is biased and full of holes, this news story being one of them.
The editorial is surprising since it displays common sense, something usually missing from the left and the MSM. Will it last? I highly doubt it. Maybe they just took their meds.
That should read “news piece,” not ‘new piece.’
WHY THE WAPO IS WRONG ABOUT PLAMEGATE
Aside from the FACT that the Washington Post chose to repeat misinformation about Plamegate that is repudiated on page 1 of the same paper, they left out a few glaring details in their ridiculous approval of Valerie Plame’s outing for political gain.
Leaking Valerie Plame’s name took a valuable resource out of the REAL war on terror. This action approved by the President and Vice President has endangered the lives of every American citizen, both at home and abroad.
Leaking Plame’s name also blew her front cover employer, Brewster Jennings & Associates. It was Robert Novak, American traitor, and political commentator hack, who in collusion with Bush and Cheney, first published the highly classified information.
It has been suggested that there were other resources within the CIA who were also working undercover as non-official cover operative” (NOC) as employees of Brewster Jennings. It has also been suggested that once their undercover status was compromised, they were quickly captured and eliminated, thus multiplying the damage done to the CIA’s ability to gather valuable information in the Mid East.
The outing of Plame destroyed all trust the CIA had for the Bush/Cheney administration. Why would they now put their lives on the line as NOCs knowing that at any time, their cover could also be blown for political gain, thus ending their careers and possibly ending their lives as well?
But there’s more!
Plame… ‘was a long-term proprietary and deep-cover NOC – well established and consistently producing “take” from ARAMCO (and who knows what else in Saudi Arabia). It was destroyed with a motive of personal vengeance (there may have been other motives) by someone inside the White House.
From the CIA’s point of view, at a time when Saudi Arabia is one of the three or four countries of highest interest to the US, the Plame operation was irreplaceable.
Almost the entire Bush administration has an interest in ARAMCO.
The Boston Globe reported that in 2001 ARAMCO had signed a $140 million multi-year contract with Halliburton, then chaired by Dick Cheney, to develop a new oil field. Halliburton does a lot of business in Saudi Arabia. Current estimates of Halliburton contracts or joint ventures in the country run into the tens of billions of dollars.
So do the fortunes of some shady figures from the Bush family’s past.
As recently as 1991 ARAMCO had Khalid bin Mahfouz sitting on its Supreme Council or board of directors. Mahfouz, Saudi Arabia’s former treasurer and the nation’s largest banker, has been reported in several places to be Osama bin Laden’s brother in law.
ARAMCO is the largest oil group in the world, a state-owned Saudi company in partnership with four major US oil companies.
Another one of Aramco?s partners is Chevron-Texaco which gave up one of its board members, Condoleezza Rice, when she became the National Security Advisor to George Bush.
All of ARAMCO?s key decisions are made by the Saudi royal family while US oil expertise, personnel and technology keeps the cash coming in and the oil going out. ARAMCO operates, manages, and maintains virtually all Saudi oil fields ? 25% of all the oil on the planet.’
http://www.oilempire.us/plame.html
Also, let’s not forget the long term friendship and business partnerships between the Bush family and the bin Laden family.
Knowing all of this, how can anyone in their right mind approve of Bush and Cheney’s treasonous behavior of outing Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings for political gain?