Reading today's
Washington Post editorial, I had to double check to see if they cropped the RNC logo off of the press release before publication. Throwing facts to the wind (including investigations by its own reporters) the editorial board calls the selective leaking of classified information as "a good leak" meant to counter Ambassador Wilson's "twisting of the truth." Indeed, the Washington Post is so proud and sure of the
accuracy of these claims, it chose to publish them in an unsigned editorial (come on, Fred Hiatt, even Ben Domenech had the guts to put his name to his journalistic embarrassments).
I'd like to focus specifically on the first line of the piece:
PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons.
While the WaPo channels Scott McClellan, let me channel the facts. President Bush did not selectively leak highly classified information to "set the record straight." He wielded his executive power in a partisan, pointed way with a singular purpose: to cover his ass, and to ensure a second term.
It is this simple fact that tends to get lost in the intricate discussions of the Plame scandal. If the President wanted to clear the air, he would have released the NIE in its entirety, to the entire press. Yet the selective leaking allowed Bush to cherry-pick the intelligence (again). This time around, it wasn't done to mislead us into war, but to mislead the nation into believing the President was deserving of a second Bush term.
As Murray Waas detailed last month, the entire discrediting of Wilson and the subsequent cover-up were centered around the pivotal task of insulating the incumbent President:
Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration.
Which is why, of course, the Executive Branch engaged in a massive, covert campaign to silence Joe Wilson. This is why only parts of the NIE were leaked to Judy Miller, so she could parrot away in the newspaper of record that the poor President was just the victim of a failed intelligence apparatus. Never mind the rest of the NIE--the parts where the Energy Department and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research said the tubes were "intended for conventional weapons". No, the goal here again was to fix the facts around the policy. The goal was to represent those leaked parts of the NIE as the "key judgments" (even though they weren't) and to represent to Judy Miller that the rest of the document bolstered those fundamentally wrong claims that the uranium was for nuclear weapons. [UPDATE: Big thanks to Quicksilver for pointing out that the NIE still remains classified--only the "key judgments" were released to the public.] The goal was to shield the President--the candidate--at all costs.
And this is why the President's actions are so revolting, so repulsive. His abuse of power--and yes, selective leaking in this way is an abuse of power--wasn't meant just to silence a war critic. It was to meant to silence the American people, to assauge their doubts about his leadership, and to portray himself as a competent Commander-in-Chief worthy of re-election.
This President cannot help himself. He is a habitual manipulator, a serial cherry-picker of intelligence. From pre-war to pre-election, his goal has been the personal interest, not the public interest. His legacy is one of a Leaker-in-Chief, selectively leaking us into war, and into a second Bush term.