Noncrimes And Punishment

From IBD:
Posted 4/7/2006

Politics: The latest media and Democrat "gotcha" is that President Bush authorized a "leak" of classified information to the press. But how can a president who determines what is classified and what is not "leak" anything?

According to reports based on what is supposed to be secret grand jury testimony, Scooter Libby — former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney — testified to the grand jury investigating his alleged lying about who told him Valerie Plame was a CIA employee that he got approval for leaking unrelated "classified" data to the press from Cheney after Cheney checked with President Bush.

To which we say, so what?

In a court brief filed by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Libby testified that Bush and Cheney declassified portions of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) the president receives, allowing Libby to use that information to defend administration policy on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction that was under attack by Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, and others.

As Cheney told Fox News in February, a standing executive order first issued in 1982 gives the president and vice president authority to declassify information.

Much of the data contained in an NIE is not classified anyway. Theoretically, the president could decide what he had for lunch that day was a state secret.

According to the documents filed, the authorization to discuss the NIE led to the July 8, 2003, conversation with New York Times reporter Judith Miller and "occurred only after the vice president advised defendant that the president specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the National Intelligence Estimate."

Fitzgerald and the Democrats seem to think this is further proof that Libby was part of a Bush administration "plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson," as the filing states, rather than an attempt to get the facts out — facts that Wilson, a proven serial liar, misstated in his infamous New York Times op-ed piece asserting that Bush lied in his State of the Union address about Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium in Africa.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said she was "troubled by news reports that President Bush may have authorized Mr. Libby to disclose intelligence information to support the administration's case for war in Iraq."

Funny, but Pelosi wasn't troubled on Oct. 7, 2002, nine months before the "leak," when the Bush administration released an unclassified version of the very same NIE at the request of Senate Democrats Dick Durbin, Carl Levin and Diane Feinstein.

This little factoid did not keep Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid from huffing and puffing that "President Bush must fully disclose his participation in the selective leak of classified information." And the brief does not specify exactly what the "certain information in the National Intelligence Estimate" was.

There has been no charge filed by Fitzgerald or anyone else that a crime was committed in disclosing what was in fact common knowledge — that Valerie Plame was a CIA desk jockey, not a covert agent, and that she was Joe Wilson's wife.

Nor does this "leak" of declassified data unrelated to what Libby is charged with, having a different recollection of who told what to whom than certain reporters, which Fitzgerald has cleverly morphed into "lying to investigators."

Unlike the actions of the media — which have leaked truly classified data, such as the existence of the NSA warrantless surveillance of terrorist operatives — neither Bush, Cheney nor Libby has done anything wrong except defend this country in time of war.