CBC News: He hates leaks, but Bush authorized one: documents — Is anyone really surprised by this? It amuses me how nothing will come of it except Libby falling on the sword.
U.S. President George Bush, who has denounced government leaks, authorized a White House official to leak U.S. intelligence about Iraqi weapons while he sought to persuade the world to support an invasion, court documents suggest.
The documents surfaced Thursday in the perjury case against Lewis (Scooter) Libby, former chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Former White House aide Lewis Libby. (File photo)Libby is accused of lying to the FBI about a leak in which a columnist was told that a woman whose husband criticized
Here we go with that ‘treason’ hyperbole again.
To be guilty of treason you have to either a.) make war against the United States, or b.) provide aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States.
Divulging classified information to build public support for a war falls under neither of those two categories.
Mike
I would think that releasing a CIA agent’s name during a time of war is treasonous in many people’s minds. Or have you forgotten, Bush uses the War on Terror to justify his actions when they suit him so I think we are at war.
The CIA spent a lot of money training Plame. Not only is that investment gone, but any person that had contact with Plame while undercover is endangered. And that could include very useful contacts yet to be fully utilized. Maybe the exact letter of the law doesn’t apply here, I’m not a legal expert, but the spirit sure does. In case you missed it, this administration has been stressing security as the reason for the erosion of our rights, the indefinite detainment of Americans, the ignoring of the Geneva Conventions, illegal wiretapping, and many other unamerican activities.
Mr Fusion,
Even if she was a covert agent at the time and her identity was protected by the statute in question, there is a big difference between secretly passing that information to an agent of one of our enemies, and giving it to a reporter from the NY Times who is going to publish it for all the world to see. In that case, a self-damaging act does not equal a treasonous act.
But back to the point, this article has nothing to do with Valarie Plame except that the release in question was discovered while investigating whether or not Scooter Libby purgered himself while testifying about the unrelated Plame “leak.”
for avenging Bush’s daddy.
Isn’t that a good reason to go to war? I would think having your citizens getting killed, including your leaders is an act of war.
I can confirm that after the events of September 11, 2001, and up to the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services and Russian intelligence several times received . . . information that official organs of Saddam’s regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the United States and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian locations.
Spoken by Vladimir Putin.
#10, There’s a lot of things he’s doing that suck, but he got a second term because he could exterminate all life on Earth personally and still be a better President than Kerry would have been.
Iraq really is like Vietnam. LBJ declassified and authorized leaks too.
http://www.nationalreview.com/robbins/robbins200604070515.asp
Wow, more than thirty comments for what is basically the same as this post:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=4196#comments
#37
From the same site you cite
It is odd that the president’s critics are taking umbrage that this release of declassified material was intended to discredit Wilson. Of course it was. What else could it be? Wilson was defaming the administration by saying that the president was a liar, in particular regarding the claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein’s regime was seeking to acquire uranium in Africa.
Since then, Bush has been shown to be a liar. That State of the Union address was not based upon bad intelligence, it was based upon selective intelligence. That is not defamation. But then, of course, Seymor Hirch had already written several stories in the New Yorker about yellow cake, aluminum tubes, mobile chemical plants, among other phony stories the Administration invented.
#38
Ya, and wasn’t that a great picture too? I loved it. Thanks for putting it back up.
The one question I have left now is:
“Did the President, The VP, the SecDef, the WH spokesman or any of theose people that work closely with the President actually attend any of their mandatory ethics classes yet?”
Apparently not, and if yes, it seems to have been taught by Tom Delay.