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.
See author page