Taylor Marsh – TaylorMarsh.com – News, Opinion and Weblog on Progressive Politics

Bush Capital Runs Out

The people know the truth. Bush is the Leaker in Chief.

The latest USA Today/Gallup poll finds more than 6
in 10 Americans critical of President George W. Bush on the leak controversy.
The more closely people are following the issue, the more likely they are
to say he did something illegal rather than unethical. The poll also shows
that 37% of Americans continue to approve of Bush's job performance, unchanged
from last month. While that is a low rating — and among the lowest of the
Bush administration — it represents no change in four Gallup polls conducted
since the end of February. Gallup

This whole business the Republicans are trotting out, that it isn't a leak
if Bush chooses to selectively declassify — only the disproved points — of
the NIE isn't washing with Americans. With President Bush on tape talking about
how he wanted to catch the leaker, then admitting he leaked the information
himself, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what's been going on for years.
The president's people have been covering for the president.

Bush's legendary “capital” has run out.

We know a leak when we see one. More importantly, we know a politically motivated
leak, coupled with a smear campaign, when we see one. Spinning won't be enough
this time around, because after saying he wanted to catch the leakers, we now
know it's Bush who is the Leaker in Chief.

Mr. Fitzgerald's filing talks not of an effort to level
with Americans but of “a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against
Mr. Wilson.” It concludes, “It is hard to conceive of what evidence
there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to
'punish Wilson.'”

With more filings expected from Mr. Fitzgerald, the
prosecutor's work has the potential to keep the focus on Mr. Bush and Mr.
Cheney at a time when the president is struggling with his lowest approval
ratings since he took office.

Even on Monday, Mr. Bush found himself in an
uncomfortable spot during an appearance at a Johns Hopkins University campus
in Washington, when a student asked him to address Mr. Fitzgerald's assertion
that the White House was seeking to retaliate against Mr. Wilson.

Mr. Bush stumbled as he began his response
before settling on an answer that sidestepped the question. He said he had
ordered the formal declassification of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate
on Iraq in July 2003 because “it was important for people to get a better
sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches” about Iraq's
efforts to reconstitute its weapons program.

Mr. Bush said nothing about the earlier, informal authorization
that Mr. Fitzgerald's court filing revealed. The prosecutor described testimony
from Mr. Libby, who said Mr. Bush had told Mr. Cheney that it was permissible
to reveal some information from the intelligence estimate, which described
Mr. Hussein's efforts to acquire uranium.

With
One Filing, Prosecutor Puts Bush in Spotlight

Mr. Wilson's article, Mr. Fitzgerald said in the
filing, “was viewed in the Office of the Vice President as a direct
attack on the credibility of the vice president (and the president) on a
matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq.”

Mr. Fitzgerald suggested that the White House effort
was a “plan” to undermine Mr. Wilson.

“Disclosing the belief that Mr. Wilson's wife
sent him on the Niger trip was one way for defendant to contradict the assertion
that the vice president had done so, while at the same time undercutting
Mr. Wilson's credibility if Mr. Wilson were perceived to have received the
assignment on account of nepotism,” Mr. Fitzgerald's filing said. (source)

“It is hard for people outside the agency to
understand how little we were thinking about Iraq,” recalled one top
intelligence official. The CIA's lack of focus on Iraq–and in particular,
the agency's failure to see Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to the
United States–infuriated the administration's hard-liners. They believed
that the opportunity for war with Iraq presented by the attacks on New York
and Washington could best be exploited by linking Baghdad to 9/11. Failing
that, it might be possible to tie Iraq more generally to al Qaeda.

The problem for the hard-liners was that the CIA
was the keeper of the vast majority of classified intelligence on al Qaeda,
and the agency's analysts had seen no evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11
and had no conclusive proof of a terrorist alliance between Saddam Hussein
and Osama bin Laden. Those answers did not satisfy Wolfowitz, or his equally
certain lieutenant, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith.

State of War, by James Risen

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. Rove expressed his concerns shortly
after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National
Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically
advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address —
that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon
— might not be true, according to government records and interviews. Insulating
Bush, by Murray Waas

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