WASHINGTON (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide told prosecutors President Bush authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq, according to court papers filed by prosecutors in the CIA leak case. - New York Times
OR
President Bush authorized White House official I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to disclose highly sensitive intelligence information to the news media in an attempt to discredit a CIA adviser whose views undermined the rationale for the invasion of Iraq, according to a federal prosecutor's account of Libby's testimony to a grand jury. - Washington Post
In other words - if you remember President Bush being asked about all this and saying he would get to the bottom of it - I wondered whether the president would have plausible deniability or not. Apparantly not.
"The White House did not challenge the prosecutor's account of Bush's and Cheney's role in orchestrating the effort to discredit Wilson yesterday." - Washington Post
No - it's not so amazing that the President authorized the leak; what is amazing is that he has been caught doing it.
All along the campaign trail - the Bush administration has been able to maintain plausible deniability with things like the Swift Boat ads; and the attacks against Max Cleland.
And they've been able to have plausible (somewhat plausible) deniability about their own beliefs and reasons for the Iraq invasion. But if you pull one card out - such as this authorized leak - then the house of cards tumbles.
They've just made too many enemies in the establishment: CIA, FBI, ARMY, AIR-FORCE etc. And my theory is that the real powers are fed up.
5 comments:
Anything and everything they do, is to protect us from evil. We must learn to stop questioning their motives, as they are God's warriors. We are in very competent hands. Shame on the rejectionists
I was wearing my "let's try and be neutral reporters' hat" at the time.
No, really, I was. Maybe the hat didn't fit right - but I thought that the protesters were hyperbolical.
Turns out that the protesters were more prescient than I could have imagined.
Man, how the mighty have fallen.
It was the top story on Imus this morning. But it didn't so much as make a blip on any of the local news shows. It is sometimes difficult to believe just how bad local news is. Bad = all covering the same stupid story of the day.
Stupid = only effects a small number of people for a limited time.
All they want is one good fire per day, and they'll be happy. And if the one fire per day turned out to be related to each other - well, that's investigative reporting and they don't have the resources for that.
The news is out there, but you have to be interested.
You can see the Key Judgements from the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate here - read them for yourself & compare to how the story is being told by the NYT et. al.:
http://www.cia.gov/nic/special_keyjudgements.html
All the stuff in white is the consensus of the majority of the various agencies (I think there were 15 total) that contributed to the NIE.
The stuff in gray (except for one block as explained below) is alternate opinion (I guess like a dissenting opinion in the supreme court?) by one agency, represtented by the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research (INR).
The other, very important gray block is the one titled, "Confidence Levels for Selected Key Judgments in This Estimate" - these bullet points form the bottom line of the 2002 NIE (I suspect, but I don't know for sure, that *this* is what Bush/Cheney directed Scooter to "leak" to the NYT and Time Magazine.)
Draw your own conclusions as to:
- was this an improper way for the White House to defend itself against charges of twising and misuse of intelligence by Joe Wilson?
- is it likely that release of this information to the 2 reporters in any way compromised national security (the NIE key findings were made public a few weeks later.)
here's an extra credit question to ponder:
- is there any sign within the recently-released court filings in the Libby case of anything related to the original reaseon for the investigation of Libby (and the Administration) - that is, allegedly leaking the identity of a covert intelligence agent?
Please write your answers in your blue books and pass them into Dave.
man! I nede a spel chzeker!
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