Bush Broke No Law

When I first saw this headline:  “In Court Filings, Cheney Aide Says Bush Approved Leak”, I was a bit taken aback.  If you read the NYT article, the third paragrapgh (Almost third line as short as newspaper paragraphs are) you read this:

    If Mr. Libby's account is accurate, it also involves Mr. Bush directly in the swirl of events surrounding the disclosure of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer.

It makes it sound like Bush told Libby to out Plame.  You have to read down another three paragraphs and read the last sentence to read this:

    However, the sections of the N.I.E. that Mr. Libby said he was freed to discuss make no mention of Valerie Plame, the C.I.A. officer who was exposed in the course of the arguments over the intelligence, prompting the leak investigation.

This is what Libby told Miller:

    Mr. Libby testified, the prosecutors said, that he was "specifically authorized in advance of the meeting to disclose the key judgments of the classified N.I.E. to Miller on that occasion because it was thought that the N.I.E. was "pretty definitive" against what Ambassador Wilson had said and that the Vice President thought that it was "very important" for the key judgments of the N.I.E. to come out."

Now, here’s the problem you have with trying to pin some charge on the President.  First, he didn’t authorize the anyone to out Valerie Plame.  This is what was authorized:

    The court filing said that Mr. Libby said "he understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the N.I.E. held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium." Mr. Libby, the prosecutors, said, testified that the meeting with Ms. Miller was the "only time he recalled in his government experience when he disclosed a document to a reporter that was effectively declassified by virtue of the president's authorization that it be disclosed."

Ms. Miller never published anything about the contents of the intelligence estimate.

Mr. Libby testified that he first told Mr. Cheney that he could not conduct such a conversation with Ms. Miller because the intelligence estimate on Iraq was classified. Mr. Libby testified that Mr. Cheney later told him that Mr. Bush had authorized the release of "relevant portions."

    In addition, Mr. Libby told the grand jury that he also spoke with David Addington, then a lawyer for Mr. Cheney, whom Mr. Libby regarded as an expert on national security law. "Mr. Addington opined that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to declassification of the document," the court filing said.

In my military career, I worked with classified documentss.  First of all, a lot of documents that have a classification often contain large chunks of unclassified information contained within the document.  As a matter of fact, each paragraph will start with a letter in parentheses. (i.e. (u) meaning unclassified, (s) for secret, etc.) The document will be classified according to the highest classification contained in the document.  I’ve seen documents with numerous pages of unclassified information except for one or two relevant paragraphs which render the whole thing classified because they are contained with in the same document.

Regardlesss of classification, the President of the United States has final say on what is classified or declassified.  The bottom line:

Bush broke no law.  Why did he declassify parts of that report?  Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters has some answers:

One can argue about the wisdom of George Bush in declassifying the Iraq NIE when he did, but let's remember that the press had been clamoring for that information ever since the fall of Baghdad three months earlier. The WMD stockpiles had not been found, and Joe Wilson among others had claimed that "Bush lied". In response, Bush declassified the NIE so that everyone could see what exactly the intelligence services had told him about Iraq's WMD programs. Now everyone wants to proclaim George Bush a criminal for releasing the information that the entire media establishment demanded he reveal.

The wisdom thing will undoubtedly be up for partisan wrangling, but did he break a law?  Sorry leftys, not this time.

VW

Comments

[Jon]

The Democrats don't care whether Bush was authorized to declassify documents as long as they can make it seem that he doesn't and all of the Anti-Bush people will spread the lies they are telling and it will look bad no matter what Bush says.

It makes sense that he would want the information out since the lies being told that he lied about the Intelligence information was being used against him by every liberal and Anti-Bush bashers.