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Libby
testimony shows a White House pattern of intelligence leaks
By Warren P.
Strobel and Ron Hutcheson, Knight
Ridder Newspapers, Friday, April 07, 2006
WASHINGTON - The
revelation that President Bush authorized former White House aide I. Lewis
"Scooter" Libby to divulge classified information about Iraq fits a
pattern of selective leaks of secret intelligence to further the
administration's political agenda.
Bush, Vice President
Dick Cheney and other top officials have reacted angrily at unauthorized leaks,
such as the exposure of a domestic wiretapping program and a network of
secret CIA prisons, both of which are now the subject of far-reaching
investigations.
But secret
information that supports their policies, particularly about the Iraq war,
has surfaced everywhere from the U.N. Security Council to major newspapers
and magazines. Much of the information that the administration leaked or
declassified, however, has proved to be incomplete, exaggerated, incorrect or
fabricated.
Court papers filed
late Wednesday by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald quote Libby as
telling a grand jury that Bush, via Cheney, authorized him to reveal the key
judgments of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction to New York Times reporter Judith Miller. The president and vice
president have virtually unlimited legal authority to declassify government
secrets.
The authorized leak,
in July 2003, came 2 days after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote an
article in The New York Times charging that the White House had manipulated
intelligence on Iraq's alleged quest for uranium ore from Africa to make its
case for war.
Libby isn't charged
with revealing or mishandling classified information, but with five counts of
perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI about the unmasking of
Wilson's wife, former CIA covert operative Valerie Plame.
On Friday, White
House officials said that the administration declassified information to
rebut charges that Bush was manipulating intelligence.
Without specifically
acknowledging Bush's actions in the Libby case, White House spokesman Scott
McClellan told reporters: "There were irresponsible and unfounded
accusations being made against the administration suggesting that we had
manipulated or misused that intelligence. We felt it was very much in the
public interest that what information could be declassified be
declassified."
McClellan didn't
address why administration officials often declassified information that
supported their allegations about Iraq but not intelligence that undercut
their claims.
Robert Hutchings,
the chairman of the National Intelligence Council from January 2003 to
February 2005, said there was nothing improper about Bush's reported actions.
However, Hutchings said, "The decision
to put in the public domain classified information, whether through a leak or
through the formal authorization" shouldn't be done for "political
convenience."
"There should be some higher purpose," he said.
Libby's allegation, which the White House
hasn't disputed, isn't the first time that the Bush administration has
declassified secrets in an effort to bolster its case for a pre-emptive war
against Iraq. The White House
declassified a range of material, including spy satellite photographs and
highly sensitive intercepts of Iraqi military communications, when former
Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U.N. Security Council in
February 2003 to argue that Iraq was an international threat.
Powell's
presentation, it's now known, came after he and his State Department team
spent several days at CIA headquarters going over the intelligence on Iraq
and tossing out dozens of pages of questionable material that Cheney's office
pressed him to include.
In September 2002,
unnamed Bush administration officials told The New York Times that Iraqi
leader Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire specially designed aluminum tubes
for use in centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Experts in the
Energy Department and elsewhere, however, didn't think that the tubes were
designed for nuclear weapons, and it's now known that they weren't.
Nevertheless,
Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Powell took to
the Sunday television talk shows on the morning that the report was published
to warn of a growing threat from Saddam. Rice used some of the same language
that appeared in the newspaper story, warning that, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a
mushroom cloud."
As the war
approached, the White House released other documents and statements
containing allegations about Saddam's weapons and ties to terrorism, many of
which included information from Iraqi defectors and other sources that
already had been discredited.
Among those was a
document published in October 2002, titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass
Destruction Programs," which was a public version of the National
Intelligence Estimate's main points - but with doubts and dissents stripped out.
Steven Aftergood, an
expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said
that while it doesn't appear that Bush did anything illegal in the Libby
case, "it does appear that the president engaged in
selective declassification for purposes of political advantage."
The latest
revelations could affect a long-running partisan feud over a Senate
Intelligence Committee probe into the administration's use of
intelligence. Committee chairman
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said this week that he hopes to complete drafts of
a report following Congress' Easter recess. Democratic leaders on Friday
renewed their call for a full investigation into Bush's use of intelligence
and the release of Plame's identity.
The White House's
McClellan took issue with suggestions that the leak to Miller called into
question the sincerity of Bush's frequent complaints about government leaks.
"There is a difference between
providing declassified information to the public when it's in the public
interest and leaking classified information that involved sensitive national
intelligence regarding our security," he said.
Still, when leaks of
classified information help make the White House's case, officials haven't
always complained. In November 2003, the conservative magazine The Weekly
Standard published highly classified raw intelligence purporting to a show a link between Saddam
and al-Qaida.
The Pentagon
disavowed the report. But in early January 2004, Cheney told the Rocky Mountain News
newspaper that the magazine report was the "best source of
information" about the Saddam/al-Qaida connection. That connection has
never been proved.
Knight
Ridder Newspapers correspondent James Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/14291979.htm
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