Reply #5: * has admitted this in 2006, info has been out there since the Libby trial [View All]

The deception Bush can't spin
Libby's testimony shows that Bush disclosed national secrets for political gain -- and makes Bush's statements about finding the leaker ludicrous.

By Joe Conason

April 7, 2006 | If we are to believe the grand jury testimony of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- as reported by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in court papers (PDF) -- then the president of the United States has been deceiving the country ever since the CIA leaks investigation began in 2003.

Compared with other deceptions that George W. Bush has perpetrated in the years since he promised to restore honor and integrity to the Oval Office, this one cannot be spun away as a misunderstanding, a "misunderestimate" or a mistake. From the moment that the Justice Department opened its probe of the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity to the press, Bush insisted that he wanted to find and punish the culprits, especially if any of them were among his White House staff. He claimed to consider the leaking of classified information to be a matter of the utmost seriousness.

And he let his press secretary insist repeatedly that the White House had absolutely no idea how this terrible thing had happened.

more:http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2006/04/07/libby_case/


~snip~

Well, now President Bush is weighing in on all of this. He is speaking out about it. It happened first yesterday at Johns Hopkins University before some students in a Q&A session. President Bush making no apologies, taking his critics head on.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice over): President Bush insists he did not leak classified information to justify his rationale for the Iraq war. Instead, he just declassified it. BUSH: You're not supposed to talk about classified information. And so, I declassified the document.

MALVEAUX: That document was the October 2002 national intelligence estimate, or NIE, which supported Mr. Bush's claim that Iraq was trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Bush cleared a portion of the NIE for public consumption as he is legally authorized to do several months after the U.S. invaded Iraq, but failed to find weapons of mass destruction.

It was part of a top-level campaign to discredit his critics who were accusing him of twisting Iraqi intelligence to justify the war.

BUSH: I decided to declassify the NIE for a reason. I wanted people to see the truth.

MALVEAUX: Court documents in the trial of top Cheney aide Scooter Libby show that the White House was particularly irked by former ambassador Joe Wilson's challenges, that Iraq sought nuclear weapons. So the president's public defense of the war was no longer enough.

more:http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/11/ltm.03.html