His honesty. Whatever quantity of honesty he ever possessed leaked away a long time ago. You haven't noticed? You didn't notice that the person who leaked the information about Valerie Plame was Bush himself? That the White House didn't deny it? You find nothing worth your time and trouble regarding this fact to be worthy of more than a flippant comment? Keep D&D Civil.
can you please provide a link to where bush "leaked the information about Valerie Plame". i count myself as fairly informed, and i have yet seen any evidence to support your claim.
You need a magnifying glass for that hair basso? Sorry Deck but apologyboy is right. Plame is never mentioned in any of this testimony from Libby concerning Bush and deadeye dick. So going past that basso do you think it wrong for the president to release highly classified material for political gain? Essentially putting party over American security in a time of war?
declassifying information is one of the rights, priveleges, and perogratives of beinging president. "for political gain" is simply your spin.
Of course, releasing it 10 days before it is declassified is not the President's perogative. Are you saying the administration lied to the media when Scott McClellan clearly said it was declassified on July 18th, 2003?
Yes he does. http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?p=2259292&highlight=political+scores#post2259292
As far as I'm concerned, the implication is clear. Libby was told to leak the classified information to discredit Wilson. During the course of doing that he disclosed Plame's name. From the Washington Post: 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. Both Bush and Cheney have been interviewed by Fitzgerald, but the details of what they told him are unknown. Fitzgerald's new account is based on Libby's grand jury testimony that Cheney told him Bush had authorized the declassification and disclosure of some of the information. Bush has been a major critic of leaks of classified information, and his aides have repeatedly said they want to "get to the bottom" of who leaked the name of Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, to the media, which touched off Fitzgerald's investigation . But in the past 33 months the White House has never disclosed Bush's apparent involvement in the deliberate disclosure of information meant to undermine Wilson. Three months before Fitzgerald began his probe in December 2003, Bush said at a news conference that "I've constantly expressed my displeasure with leaks, particularly leaks of classified information. . . . If there's a leak out of the administration, I want to know who it is. And if a person has violated law, the person will be taken care of." ................ That NIE contained information that Bush and Cheney felt would rebut Wilson's claims about the exaggeration of Iraq's nuclear threat. "The evidence will show," Fitzgerald wrote, "that the July 6, 2003 Op Ed by Mr. Wilson was viewed in the Office of the Vice President as a direct attack on the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq." Libby, he wrote, was essentially dispatched to rebut this attack the following week. According to Fitzgerald's account, Libby considered this task unusual and initially protested "because of the classified nature of the NIE." But Cheney -- at some later date, not specified in the court filing -- "advised him that the President had authorized" disclosures from that document. Libby also testified that the vice president's legal counsel, David S. Addington, "opined that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to declassification of the document." The date that Addington offered this advice to Libby is not specified in Fitzgerald's account. The exclusive venue for the rebuttal effort was meant to be the New York Times, where then-reporter Judith Miller had written a number of articles that highlighted Iraq's nuclear ambitions. Libby met with Miller at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington two days after the Wilson article was published, and he brought a brief abstract of the National Intelligence Estimate's key judgments. "Defendant testified that this July 8th meeting was the only time he recalled in his government experience when he disclosed a document to a reporter that was effectively declassified by the President's authorization that it be disclosed." But Libby said he and Cheney agreed that it was "very important" for the NIE's conclusions to be disclosed. Libby told Miller, among other things, that the NIE concluded Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium," according to Fitzgerald's filing. In fact, the CIA did not believe this allegation, which came from the Defense Intelligence Agency and remains unproved to this day, according to intelligence analysts. Libby told investigators that he never mentioned Plame's name in this conversation, but the grand jury indicted him on charges of lying about this. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/06/AR2006040600333_pf.html The grand jury indicted Libby for lying about disclosing Plame's name at this meeting with Miller. He's told to do this by George W. Bush, via Cheney. He "declassifies" top secret information attempting to discredit Wilson, while telling the country that he wants to find those leakers and punish them. It is very plausible, in my opinion, that Libby doesn't disclose Plame's name if he doesn't meet with the reporters on orders from the President. (again, via Cheney) The hypocrisy is indeed breathtaking. Personally, I believe that Libby was told to disclose the name of Wilson's wife by the Vice-President. I hold Bush responsible as well, because the whole black operation was done on his orders. Keep D&D Civil.
Every time I click on one of your posts, I'm reminded why you are on my ignore list. This is the most completely ignorant statement possible. I mean seriously, how can you be so naive/stupid/complacent/unamerican?
Even the administration has admitted it. They felt it was important to make their case for war. They didn't need to convince anyone in order to go to war - the convincing was simply to drum up popular support. In other words, political gain.
They didn't need to convince anyone because the leak came in July 2003, IIRC, 3 months after the war had started and after "mission accomplished".
Sam no one, except Deckard, is charging that the president authorized the disclosure of Ms. Flame's name, or the fact that she was employed at CIA. neither, for that matter is that what libby is charged with. The name Valerie/Plame/Flame/Wilson doesn't even apper in the NIE portions on iraqi wmd that were later declassified. and significantly, mr. fitzgerald refuses to even disclose whether she was a covert agent. Bush authorized disclosure of portions of the nie to counter illegal leaks and news stories that had purposefully distored it's contents. He did so to correct the record, and fight back against critics like joe wilson who were themselves lying and spreading disinformation, for purely partisan political gain, as the Senate Intelligence Committee later proved. i would assume you would grant that the president has the right to set the record straight. only in a perverse political culture, with the MSM and their toadies in the blogosphere utterly consumed by BDS, could divulging the truth be spun as a "leak."
How? By authorizing a subordinate to leak the information to an administration-friendly reporter? Sorry, this doesn't hold water. If he wanted to set the record straight, then why not call a press conference, go out there himself, and lay the facts before the American people and the world. Instead, we have a President twice removed from the information that "sets the record straight," one through a subordinate and again through Judith Miller. Why is that? Leadership? Integrity?
The latest, from the rabid, bush-loving neocons on the WaPo editorial board. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/08/AR2006040800895.html -- A Good Leak President Bush declassified some of the intelligence he used to decide on war in Iraq. Is that a scandal? Sunday, April 9, 2006; B06 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. Mr. Wilson subsequently claimed that the White House set out to punish him for his supposed whistle-blowing by deliberately blowing the cover of his wife, Valerie Plame, who he said was an undercover CIA operative. This prompted the investigation by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald. After more than 2 1/2 years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald has reported no evidence to support Mr. Wilson's charge. In last week's court filings, he stated that Mr. Bush did not authorize the leak of Ms. Plame's identity. Mr. Libby's motive in allegedly disclosing her name to reporters, Mr. Fitzgerald said, was to disprove yet another false assertion, that Mr. Wilson had been dispatched to Niger by Mr. Cheney. In fact Mr. Wilson was recommended for the trip by his wife. Mr. Libby is charged with perjury, for having lied about his discussions with two reporters. Yet neither the columnist who published Ms. Plame's name, Robert D. Novak, nor Mr. Novak's two sources have been charged with any wrongdoing. 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. © 2006 The Washington Post Company
