So now it appears that Bush authorized Cheney to authorize someone (who turned out to be Libby) to disseminate some information about Iraq that had (at some point) been classified information. He did it to counter some of Wilson's charges that the justification for the war was based on manipulated intelligence. From one of the AP stories:
In a federal court filing last week, the prosecutor in the case said Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, testified before a grand jury that he was authorized by Bush, through Cheney, to leak information from a classified document that detailed intelligence agencies' conclusions about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
A lawyer knowledgeable about the case said Saturday that Bush declassified sensitive intelligence in 2003 and authorized its public disclosure to rebut Iraq war critics, but he did not specifically direct that Libby be the one to disseminate the information.
Now there's an argument of semantics going on about whether or not this was a "leak" or a "declassification". Of course, it almost doesn't matter. Bush's message to the members of his administration was obvious: when the chips are down, and someone attacks you politically,
it's fair game to use supposedly secret information to counter the charges. Whoever decided to leak the fact that Valerie Plame (Wilson's wife) was an undercover CIA employee was clearly taking his (or her, I suppose) lead from the president.
Sure, Bush's "declassification" may not have put an American undercover operative in danger, but who knows what kind of chain of logic might allow someone to figure out the identity of some intelligence asset somewhere based on it. And sure, Bush may not have meant to project the image that any leaking would be okay in the service of political defense, but it's just not such a stretch to think that a conservative zealot would see that image anway.
This is exactly the problem. George W. Bush doesn't understand what it means to lead by example. When he says that schools should look at "both sides" of the evolution non-debate, he gives ammunition to the even-further-to-the-right players to pick up the ball and run with it. Which undermines the credibity of his state-of-the-union pledge to bulk up science education.
When he projects the image (apparently false) that he doesn't really read the news and just makes decisions from his "gut", he relieves others in his administration of the responsibility to back up their actions with sound reasoning.
When he claims that a pre-emptive strike is a legitimate reason for a military attack, he doesn't recognize that he has just given permission to any country (say, oh, Iran) to attack any other country (say, oh, Israel) that it claims to perceive as a threat.
When he allows energy industry executives to be the main sources of information on which his administration bases energy policies, he gives Tom Delay the okay to simply refuse to listen to any lobbying firm that doesn't hire Republicans so that Delay won't have to listen to dissent, either.
When he presides over unprecedented deficit increases without a single veto of a spending bill, he gives Senators and Representatives permission to ask for just about any pork-barrel spending that his or her district "needs".
Monkey see, monkey do, Mr. President, and you're the lead monkey.
Just wanted to make sure it was okay that I quoted at some length from you.
You can check it out and let me know if I need to pare it back.
Posted by: Mr. Person | June 30, 2006 at 08:05 PM