April 08, 2006
In reading the continuous - and deplorable, I might add - coverage of the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial procedings, I came across the little fracus going on between the guys at Powerline and the New York Daily News' Kenneth Bazinet. At issue is Mr. Bazinet's characterization of the "leak" revelations and his branding of the President as "leaker in chief".
What caught my eye was this little nugget from Mr. Bazinet's latest article:
The White House insisted yesterday President Bush did nothing wrong in authorizing a leak of prewar intelligence because he had allegedly declassified the secret information.Here is the relevant portion (emphasis ours):McClellan argued yesterday there was nothing wrong in what the President did because Bush had declassified the information.
"Declassifying information and providing it to the public when it is in the public interest is one thing," McClellan said.
"But leaking classified information that could compromise our national security is something that is very serious, and there's a distinction," he said.
The leak came several months after the invasion of Iraq, as U.S. troops were unable to find any of the weapons of mass destruction that were a main reason for the war.Bogus? Really? He proved this? As fact? I mean, in light of the fact that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had this to say about Joe Wilson's report -The leak was intended to rebut what McClellan said were inaccurate stories that the prewar intel had been manipulated.
Also, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had just revealed that administration claims that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger to make nuclear bombs were bogus.
- it would seem that Joe Wilson (putting it nicely) had a few problems remembering things. And in continuing reading the report, clearly somebody suspected that Iraq was up to no good in Niger. Was there some kind of smoking gun? Nope. And nobody ever claimed there was. The "16 words" the White House was battling came from Britain, who still stand by their assessment. And those words (which never actually mentioned Niger by the way) had been approved for use, by the CIA, in speech after speech after speech that the President was going to give on Iraq - yet he did not use them until the State of the Union address.
So Joe Wilson, spewing his "recollections" in the New York Times, seemed to be creating something of a problem, in that he was giving out the wrong story. The White House responded by giving out portions of the NIE to reporters, to correct the record. The President approved that, and he has that power. He did not approve the leaking of a covert operative's name (if Valerie Plame is even covert, Fitzgerald won't even answer that question).
How sad that journalists like Mr. Bazinet find it more amusing to trump up selective truths with some scintillating prose. As Scott Johnson of Powerline writes (quoting at length because it's just that good):
I noted that the Libby "leak" to Judith Miller of relevant conclusions from the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate had taken place on July 8, while the relevant portions of the NIE had been declassified and released to the public on July 18. I asked Bazinet why that information wasn't in his story. He referred to considerations of space, then stated that he had written that these events occurred in July. I said his lead was misleading, that his whole story was predicated on conflating Bush's comments about Plame with the declassification and dissemination of the contents of the NIE.And that of course would ruin the DNC talking points that Bush lied, and that Joe Wilson is some type of hero...for blowing the lid off his trip and paving the way for the discovery of his wife's identity.I asked Bazinet what he meant by referring to the 2002 NIE as "a secret and still-uncorroborated document..." He said it was "secret" in that it had not been entirely declassified; only portions have been declassified. I asked what he meant by referring to the NIE as "still-uncorroborated." He responded: "Have you found the WMD's, Scott?" He said that the NIE was "bogus." Why had he referred to it as "secret" when the relevant portions had in fact been declassified? "I covered the ground." He also referred to "selective declassification."
I asked Bazinet if he had read Fitzgerald's brief; he said he had. I asked why Bazinet hadn't noted that, according to Fitzgerald, Libby had testified that the "key judgments of the NIE" that Libby had disclosed to Miller on July 8 "had been declassified" (page 24 of Fitzgerald's brief). Bazinet responded that that was what Libby had said.
Bazinet's story was based on Libby's testimony; simply dismissing the point as Libby's makes no sense. Why wasn't that part of Libby's testimony mentioned in Bazinet's story? Bazinet referred to his observation toward the end of the story that "a source indicated Bush might argue that he had declasssified the material before Libby leaked it." I infer, however, that any more clarity on this particular point would have belied Bazinet's desire to work that "leaker-in-chief" stuff into the lead.
But I do applaud the Daily News' commitment to "article space," even at the expense of some of the most important facts of the scandal. Bravo. Journalists standing for something.
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://zeropointblog.com/blog-mt/mt-tb.fcgi/47
