President Bush is Leaker-in-Chief

The ship of state does, indeed, leak from the top. After George “LBJ” Bush went on the warpath earlier in his presidency about the disclosure of information to the press that he didn’t want released, it now turns out that one of the biggest “leaks” of his administration came from his own lips. In court papers from the “Scooter” Libby trial, the defendant has testified that the vice-president told him the president gave orders to release to reporter Judith Miller certain facts from a classified National Intelligence Estimate. It was a selective disclosure intended to boost the case for war in Iraq.

The press and public have confused this and the leak of Valerie Plame’s job as a CIA operative, and it must be stressed that they aren’t linked except insofar as both leaks were politically motivated. Indeed, the Plame leak is merely serious, affecting as it does America’s ability to gather intelligence and protect intelligence officers and reporters. The NIE leak is lethal, putting America on a path to war by releasing some, but not all, of the NIE’s contents. Whether it reaches the Nuremberg standard of launching a war of aggression or of a crime against peace is hard to say, but it is despicable.

Legally, it seems that the president has declassify information on his own authority, and that makes sense. As the Romans used to say, “Licit Jovi non licit bovi,” or loosely, “Jupiter is allowed things cows aren’t.” However, Mr. Libby had his talk with Judith Miller on July 8, 2003, and White House spokesman Scott McClennan told the press on July 18, 2003 that the NIE had been “officially declassified today.” Did someone just forget to tell Mr. McClennan? Suppose, this was all perfectly legal. Consider what the NIE contained.

In part, it read, “if left unchecked, it [Iraq] probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.” While one is confident that Mr. Libby was allowed to disclose that, he wasn’t permitted to offer the State Department's dissent which read in part, “Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, INR [State’s office of Intelligence and Research] is unwilling to speculate that such an effort began soon after the departure of UN inspectors or to project a timeline for the completion of activities it does not now see happening. As a result, INR is unable to predict when Iraq could acquire a nuclear device or weapon.”

The White House was hardly going to tell the press that there was any ambiguity in the NIE because to do so was to undermine the initial (now abandoned) pretext for war. Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday” that he thought the president owed the country an explanation. “I think that it is necessary for the president and the vice president to tell the American people exactly what happened,” he said. And indeed, they should.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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