A Bad Leak
EDITORIAL, NYTimes on
the Web, April 16, 2006
President Bush says he declassified
portions of the prewar intelligence assessment on Iraq because he "wanted people
to see the truth" about Iraq's weapons programs and to understand why he kept
accusing Saddam Hussein of stockpiling weapons that turned out not to exist.
This would be a noble sentiment if it actually bore any relationship to Mr.
Bush's actions in this case, or his overall record.
Mr. Bush did not declassify the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq — in any
accepted sense of that word — when he authorized I. Lewis Libby Jr., through
Vice President Dick Cheney, to talk about it with reporters. He permitted
a leak of cherry-picked portions of the report. The declassification came
later.
And this president has never shown the slightest interest in disclosure, except
when it suits his political purposes. He has run one of the most secretive
administrations in American history, consistently withholding information and
vital documents not just from the public, but also from Congress. Just the
other day, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the House Judiciary Committee
that the names of the lawyers who reviewed Mr. Bush's warrantless wiretapping
program were a state secret.
Obviously, we do not object to government officials talking to reporters about
important matters that their bosses do not want discussed. It would be
impossible to cover any administration, especially one so secretive as this,
unless that happened. (Judith Miller, who then worked for The Times, was
one of the reporters Mr. Libby chose for this leak, although she never wrote
about it.) But the version of the facts that Mr. Libby was authorized to
divulge was so distorted that it seems more like disinformation than any sincere
attempt to inform the public.
This fits the pattern of Mr. Bush's original sales pitch on the Iraq war —
hyping the intelligence that bolstered his case and suppressing the intelligence
that undercut it. In this case, Mr. Libby was authorized to talk about
claims that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa and not
more reliable evidence to the contrary.
About a month before, Mr. Bush rushed to announce that American forces had found
evidence of a biological weapons program in Iraq — trailers that could have been
used to make doomsday devices. We now know, from a report in The
Washington Post, that a Pentagon team actually on the ground in Iraq inspecting
the trailers had concluded two days earlier that they were nothing of the kind.
The White House says Mr. Bush was not aware of that report, and was relying on
an assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence
Agency. This is hardly the first time we've been told that intelligence
reports contradicting administration doctrine somehow did not make it to Mr.
Bush's desk. But it does not explain why he and Mr. Cheney went on talking
about the trailers for weeks, during which the State Department's intelligence
division — about the only agency that got it right about Iraq — debunked the
mobile-labs theory.
Of course, the inaccurate report saying that the trailers were bioweapons labs
was made public, immediately, while the accurate one was kept secret until a
reporter found out about it.
Since Mr. Bush regularly denounces leakers, the White House has made much of the
notion that he did not leak classified information, he declassified it.
This explanation strains credulity. Even a president cannot wave a wand
and announce that an intelligence report is declassified.
To declassify an intelligence document, officials have to decide whether
disclosing the information would jeopardize the sources that provided it or the
methods used to gather it. To answer that question, they closely study the
origins of the intelligence to be disclosed. Had Mr. Bush done that, he
should have seen that the most credible information made it clear that the Niger
story was wrong. (In any case, Iraq's supposed attempt to buy uranium from
Niger happened four years before the invasion, and failed. The idea that
this amounted to a current, aggressive and continuing campaign to build nuclear
weapons in 2002 — as Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney called it — is laughable.)
This messy episode leaves more questions than answers, so it is imperative that
two things happen soon. First, the federal prosecutor in the Libby case
should release the transcripts of what Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney said when he
questioned them. And the Senate Intelligence Committee must report
publicly on how Mr. Bush and his team used the flawed intelligence on Iraq.
Senator Pat Roberts, the committee chairman, says the panel will meet this month
to discuss three of the report's five sections. That's a step. And
it has taken only two years to get this far.
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