All leaks not created equal, White House insists

All leaks not created equal, White House insists

By David Stout. Copyright by The New York Times

SATURDAY, APRIL 8, 2006

WASHINGTON:
The White House tried Friday to quell the furor over the leaking of sensitive prewar intelligence on Iraq, as President George W. Bush's spokesman insisted that any release of information had been "in the public interest" rather than for political reasons.

The spokesman, Scott McClellan, said a decision had been made to declassify and release some information to rebut "irresponsible and unfounded accusations" that the administration had manipulated or misused prewar intelligence to buttress its case for war. "That was flat-out false," McClellan said.

McClellan was barraged at a news briefing by questions about assertions by I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby has reportedly said that Bush, through Cheney, authorized him in July 2003 to disclose important parts of what was until then a classified prewar intelligence estimate on Iraq.

At the time, the Pentagon had hardly finished basking in the easy initial military victory in Iraq when it was caught up in questions over the failure to find "weapons of mass destruction" there - the main rationale for going to war. One of the findings in the prewar data was that Saddam Hussein was probably seeking fuel for nuclear reactors.

McClellan said the Democrats who had pounced on Libby's assertions, contained in a court document filed Wednesday, were "engaging in crass politics" in refusing to recognize the distinction between legitimate disclosure of information in the public interest and irresponsible leaking for political reasons.

Democrats continued to assail the administration Friday. "This is a serious allegation with national security consequences," Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, said on the Senate floor. "It directly contradicts previous statements made by President Bush, it continues a pattern of misleading by this Bush White House and it raises somber and troubling questions about the Bush administration's candor with the Congress and the public."

Reid said it was time for Bush to say whether, in fact, he had authorized the disclosure of the prewar intelligence, as Libby said he had. "He must tell the American people whether the Bush Oval Office is the place where the buck stops, or the leaks start," Reid said.

McClellan was in the somewhat odd position of not disputing that Bush had been involved in the disclosure of hitherto classified information, while describing any such disclosure as being in the public good. He has said before that a president has the authority to declassify intelligence, and said Friday that he was "not getting into confirming or denying things, because I'm not commenting at all on matters relating to an ongoing legal proceeding."

He was alluding to the trial of Libby on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with an inquiry over who unmasked Valerie Plame Wilson, an undercover officer for the CIA, in the summer of 2003.

The unmasking occurred after her husband, the former diplomat Joseph Wilson, wrote in The New York Times that he doubted reports that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Niger.

Not at all, McClellan said. "Declassifying information and providing it to the public when it is in the public interest is one thing," he said. "But leaking classified information that could compromise our national security is something that is very serious. And there is a distinction" - a distinction Democrats refuse to see, he said repeatedly.