President Bush has been in hot water for much of the last year. The most recent scandal of the week has to do with allegations by the vice-president’s former chief of staff that the president authorized underlings to leak classified information in order to discredit critics.
It’s been argued that what the president did is not illegal. It’s been argued that since the president decides what is classified, if he allows the leak of something, then he’s implicitly de-classifying it. It’s a bit of a shaky argument. I profess to being unsure of what the laws of classified information are but somehow, I imagine there’s a bit more required than the president ok’ing a leak to a newspaper columnist. I could be wrong, though.
It’s even been argued that this was a ‘good leak’ (such as by a Washington Post editorial).
But it certainly opens him up to accusations of hypocrisy, which perhaps the administration is used to by now but the public is tiring of. The shiftiness seems almost to evoke President Clinton’s infamous lines “It depends on what your definition of the word ‘is’ is” and “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” The guy was trying to get off on a technicality. Maybe we need to wait for President Bush to receive oral sex before he is finally held accountable.
"I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information," Bush told reporters in Chicago when asked about leaks on Sept. 30, 2003. "If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action. There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of.", noted The Chicago Tribune.
Now if the president did really authorize the leak (and the administration has so far refused to deny this) before he was implicitly denying so, then the bald-face deception is stunning, even by this administration’s standards.
The way the president and his advisors handled the affair is a de facto admission of culpability. They know they’re guilty as sin. Maybe not legally, but they know that morally (snicker), they haven’t a leg to stand on.
Think about it.
The president has so far refused to comment on the allegations by the vice-president’s chief of staff. The president’s spokesman as well as some of his apologists have said the president not only had the right to leak the information but was right to do so. They argue that the de-classified information served to better inform the public and clear up alleged misconceptions about the reasons for going to war.
Let’s forget for a moment about releasing information for the purpose of personally smearing a critic. Let’s forget that outing a CIA agent was something President Bush’s father, a former CIA director himself, once called ‘treason. Let’s assume for a second that this assertion is reasonable. If so, then great! This administration is the most secretive administration in the history of the Republic. Any time they actually want to release information, it’s an astonishing but pleasant surprise.
But if the stated purpose of releasing this information was to better inform the public about the president’s rationale for launching the invasion of Iraq, why didn’t the president or his spokesman or one of his cabinet officials stand before the media and release that information directly? Or when asked back in 2003, why didn’t the president just say, “Yes, I authorized the leak because I believed it in the public interest.”
That it was done by a secret leak where the leaker initially only released the information based on a pledge of confidentiality shows that the administration KNEW they were do something slimy and didn’t want to get caught.
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