Libby testimony shows a White House pattern of intelligence leaks

Libby testimony shows a White House pattern of intelligence leaks is the title of a Knight Ridder Newspapers story by Warren P. Strobel & Ron Hutcheson which substantiates Digby's thesis that BushCo are hypocritical serial leakers.

Excerpts:

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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 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.