Pacridge said:
Did he declassify it and then release or merely release it?
The corollary to the above is, "when is a 'leak' a 'leak'? So-called 'leaks' and selective disclosures of information have been used by every President since the invention of the telegraph. It is part of the power of the incumbency. In the case at hand, some memories seem conveniently short. To wit:
On July 20, 2003, the AP headlined a story bylined Tom Raum as: "Declassified CIA documents on Iraq show divided intelligence community". Excerpts from the story:
The White House declassified portions of an October 2002 intelligence report to demonstrate that President Bush had ample reason to believe Iraq was reconstituting a nuclear weapons program.
But the material also reflects divisions and uncertainties among intelligence agencies as to Saddam Hussein's activities.
The State Department, for instance, expressed deep skepticism over claims that Saddam was shopping for uranium ore in Africa to use in making atomic bombs - an allegation that wound up in Bush's Jan. 28 State of the Union address but which administration officials have since repudiated.
"Claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are ... highly dubious," said a State Department addendum included among the declassified material.
The administration released the documents - a sanitized version of the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate prepared for the president - on Friday as it sought to shield Bush from rising criticism that he misled the public in making his case for war with Iraq.
Administration aides suggested that the eight pages of excerpts, out of 90 in the document, demonstrate the notion that Saddam was trying to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program permeated the U.S. intelligence community - and was not just based on a suspect British report that relied in part on forged documents.
Referring to the same document, Knight Ridder ran a shorter story on the same subject on July 19, 2003, under the headline, "Bush releases excerpts of top-secret Iraq report". Portions of that story read thusly:
Hoping to quell the controversy over President Bush's use of questionable intelligence to help make the case for war with Iraq, White House officials on Friday released portions of a top-secret report from last year that concluded that Saddam Hussein was actively seeking nuclear weapons.
But that finding in the classified National Intelligence Estimate, prepared for the White House last October, came loaded with reservations that reflected deep divisions in the intelligence community over Iraq's weapons programs and were at odds with the certainty expressed by Bush and his top aides.
The report even quoted intelligence experts at the State Department as describing assertions that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Africa as "highly dubious." Bush nevertheless repeated the assertion in his State of the Union speech in January while arguing the need for war. Uranium is a key component of nuclear bombs.
Although the report concluded that Iraq was seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, it acknowledged the scarcity of solid information. If the excerpts accurately reflect the full report, Bush reached the decision to go to war by assuming the worst about Iraq's capabilities and Hussein's intentions.
White House officials held a 75-minute briefing Friday on White House contacts with the CIA during the drafting of the speech. A senior administration official, insisting on anonymity, said the CIA approved the wording of Bush's speech without "any flag raised about the underlying intelligence."
Note that:
> these stories show that the release of the NIE was part of an attempt to quell the political uproar that was starting to build over what Bush did and did not know before the war.
> the stories show that the "leak" while criticized for being "selective", included the State Department minority opinion.
> the only new element of the story that was added last week via Patrick Fitzgerald's brief is that Bush (according to Cheny according to Libby), authorized the release of the NIE report ten days earlier than the July 18 briefing that was widely reported, and that they disclosed it to Judith Miller, who didn't write about it.
> the NYTs story reported only that bBush authorized the declassification and release of the NIE report, not the manner of its disclosure specifically to their staffer, Judith Miller.
One pundit remarked, "That Fitzgerald is one helluva digger, able to ferret out this stuff that was in the headlines three years ago...".
Source.
