Classified Declassification

Not had enough of your intelligence insulted, by the boy who would be king and his playmates? Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker cites the relevant portion of the Fitzgerald filing. Patrick Fitzgerald's characterization of Scooter Libby's testimony makes clear that this declassification was an inside deal that only Bush, V.P. Cheney, and Libby knew about: According to defendant [Libby], at the time of his conversations with [Judith] Miller and [Matthew] Cooper, he understood that only three people - the President, the Vice President and defendant - knew that the key judgments of the [National Intelligence Estimate] had been declassified. Defendant testified in the grand jury that he understood that even in the days following his conversation with Ms. Miller, other key officials - including Cabinet level officials - were not made aware of the earlier declassification even as those officials were pressed to carry out a declassification of the NIE, the report about Wilson's trip and another classified document dated January 24, 2003. --- Murray Waas is also on the story. He observes: Additionally, Libby "testified that he also spoke to David Addington, then counsel to the Vice President, whom [Libby] considered to be an expert in national security law, and Mr. Addington opined that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of the document." Addington succeeded Libby as Cheney's chief of staff after Libby was indicted… … Waas also says: One former senior government official said that both the president and Cheney, in directing Libby to disclose classified information to defend the administration's case to go to war with Iraq and in formally declassifying portions of the NIE later, were misusing the classification process for political reasons. … The former senior official said in an interview that he believed that the attempt to conceal the contents of the one-page summary were intertwined with the efforts to declassify portions of the NIE and to leak information to the media regarding Plame: "It was part and parcel of the same effort, but people don't see it in that context yet." … Waas additionally makes a point to note that "Legal experts disagree on whether the president has the authority to declassify information on his own." --- just a reminder, someone famous once declared: "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…" … "In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people." --- update: Christy at firedoglake addreses "The Whole Declassification Question." --- Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker reports: Henry Waxman has written a letter to the President inquiring about classification issues regarding the Plame investigation. update2: from Raw Story: Jane Harman describes Bush as Leaker-in-Chief. via atrios CNN's Bill Schneider: SCHNEIDER: I think is it very damaging for the president to be seen here to have come out after his political enemies by authorizing -- no crime -- by authorizing the leak of classified information from the National Intelligence Estimate. Again, we don't know what classified information that was, it's only described in the special prosecutor's report as certain information, key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate, relevant portions that were aimed at discrediting the published views of Ambassador Wilson, who criticized the administration's intelligence-gathering efforts. He was out to get his political enemy, to discredit Joe Wilson. And he did it by authorizing intelligence information to be leaked. I think most Americans would say that's a very dangerous and very foolish thing to do.