Lighting a Fire Under the White House
| By citizen - Apr 10th, 2006 at 2:58 pm EDT |
If you missed the White House press conference on Friday, you missed a beautiful thing. Last week, Scooter Libby, former chief aide to Dick Cheney, revealed in grand jury testimony that President Bush himself authorized Cheney to authorize Libby to disseminate classified information, namely the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
As soon as the testimony hit the news, the press was abuzz, and by Friday afternoon, they gleefully tore into Press Secretary Scot McClellan with fangs bared. For his part, McClellan put on a brave face and attempted to deflect the blows with "It is the policy of this administration not to comment on an ongoing investigation," and "You have to draw a distinction," apparently, between the sort of leaking that threatens national security (which the Plame leak did), and the sort of leaking that is purely political but it's ok because the president said so.
On the subject of distinctions, however, McClellan conspicuously ignored the distinction between the president formally and publicly declassifying records he feels are in the public interest to disseminate, and sneakily instructing lower level staffers to whisper cherry picked pieces of intelligence to favored reporters, then denying any White House connection to the leak and promising to prosecute anyone connected to it.
Well, now Mr. Bush is connected to it, and while declassifying information is, for him at least, not a crime, there is some uncertainty as to whether the proper procedure was followed, and whether revealing the information was truly in the public interest. Given that revealing Plame's identity publicly created threats to her life and those of her contacts, and destroyed one hard-earned undercover intelligence post, thereby potentially weakening national security, and given that the only possible benefit to the public of knowing this information would be the discreditation of Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, whose information about Iraq's nuclear ambitions turned out to be spot on (thus making the leak more of a public detriment than a benefit), this will be a hard case for the White House to argue.
The plain fact is that the White House intentionally exposed Valerie Plame, either in an attempt to discredit her husband, or as an act of revenge for her husband's column on Iraq's supposed attempts to obtain uranium, and subsequently attempted to distance itself from the whole affair.
While the White House can usually argue (with some plausability for the only partially engaged) that their policies are designed with the best intentions for the public in mind, this case lays bare that President Bush and the White house are simply more concerned about self-preservation, political gain, and revenge than they are about national security.
At 36% approval and falling, the country may just be coming, finally, to the same conclusion.
As soon as the testimony hit the news, the press was abuzz, and by Friday afternoon, they gleefully tore into Press Secretary Scot McClellan with fangs bared. For his part, McClellan put on a brave face and attempted to deflect the blows with "It is the policy of this administration not to comment on an ongoing investigation," and "You have to draw a distinction," apparently, between the sort of leaking that threatens national security (which the Plame leak did), and the sort of leaking that is purely political but it's ok because the president said so.
On the subject of distinctions, however, McClellan conspicuously ignored the distinction between the president formally and publicly declassifying records he feels are in the public interest to disseminate, and sneakily instructing lower level staffers to whisper cherry picked pieces of intelligence to favored reporters, then denying any White House connection to the leak and promising to prosecute anyone connected to it.
Well, now Mr. Bush is connected to it, and while declassifying information is, for him at least, not a crime, there is some uncertainty as to whether the proper procedure was followed, and whether revealing the information was truly in the public interest. Given that revealing Plame's identity publicly created threats to her life and those of her contacts, and destroyed one hard-earned undercover intelligence post, thereby potentially weakening national security, and given that the only possible benefit to the public of knowing this information would be the discreditation of Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, whose information about Iraq's nuclear ambitions turned out to be spot on (thus making the leak more of a public detriment than a benefit), this will be a hard case for the White House to argue.
The plain fact is that the White House intentionally exposed Valerie Plame, either in an attempt to discredit her husband, or as an act of revenge for her husband's column on Iraq's supposed attempts to obtain uranium, and subsequently attempted to distance itself from the whole affair.
While the White House can usually argue (with some plausability for the only partially engaged) that their policies are designed with the best intentions for the public in mind, this case lays bare that President Bush and the White house are simply more concerned about self-preservation, political gain, and revenge than they are about national security.
At 36% approval and falling, the country may just be coming, finally, to the same conclusion.
!
Comments are closed for this post.