Maybe

Tonight on Countdown, John Dean told Keith Olbermann that if President Bush did indeed “authorize” Scooter Libby to release classified information to the press, the act may or may not be legal. According to Dean, although Presidents do have the authority to release classified information, there are procedures they are (by law) supposed to follow to do so. Also, it is questionable whether the information Scooter leaked to the press was officially declassified, since it appears no one in the CIA or other intelligence agencies knew about it.

I’m sure there will be more details tomorrow.

Presidential Authorizations

Murray Waas:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff has testified that President Bush authorized him to disclose the contents of a highly classified intelligence assessment to the media to defend the Bush administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq, according to papers filed in federal court on Wednesday by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case.

Here’s the document itself. Below is, I think, the critical part, which is from pages 19-21. I’ll start with the paragraph before to provide a bit of context. Fitzgerald is explaining why Libby doesn’t need all the classified files he says he needs in order to defend himself.

At some point after the publication of the July 6, 2003 Op Ed by Mr. Wilson, Vice President Cheney, defendant’s immediate superior, expressed concerns to defendant regarding whether Mr. Wilson’s trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson’s wife. And, in considering “context,” there was press reporting that the Vice President had dispatched Mr. Wilson on the trip (which in fact was not accurate). 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. The context for defendant’s disclosures in the course of defending the Office of the Vice President will not be fleshed out in any files of CIA or State Department or NSC employees that might reflect what they thought. Put slightly differently, the thoughts and impressions of CIA, State Department, and NSC employees, absent any evidence that these thoughts and impressions were conveyed to defendant, simply cannot shed light on defendant’s state of mind at the time of his alleged criminal conduct. See United States v. Secord, 726 F.Supp. 845, 848-49 (D.D.C. 1989) (“The subjective state of mind which Defendant Secord wishes to prove could have arisen solely from conversations in which he participated, correspondence which he himself read, meetings which he himself attended. . . . The point is simply that Defendant’s state of mind can come only from what he hears or sees. Defendant is entitled to discover materials which evidence his personal knowledge about or belief in the legality of the Enterprise.”).

Nor would such documents of the CIA, NSC and the State Department place in context the importance of the conversations in which defendant participated. Defendant’s participation in a critical conversation with Judith Miller on July 8 (discussed further below) occurred only after the Vice President advised defendant that the President specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the NIE. Defendant testified that the circumstances of his conversation with reporter Miller – getting approval from the President through the Vice President to discuss material that would be classified but for that approval – were unique in his recollection. Defendant further testified that on July 12, 2003, he was specifically directed by the Vice President to speak to the press in place of Cathie Martin (then the communications person for the Vice President) regarding the NIE and Wilson. Defendant was instructed to provide what was for him an extremely rare “on the record” statement, and to provide “background” and “deep background” statements, and to provide information contained in a document defendant understood to be the cable authored by Mr. Wilson. During the conversations that followed on July 12, defendant discussed Ms. Wilson’s employment with both Matthew Cooper (for the first time) and Judith Miller (for the third time). Even if someone else in some other agency thought that the controversy about Mr. Wilson and/or his wife was a trifle, that person’s state of mind would be irrelevant to the importance and focus defendant placed on the matter and the importance he attached to the surrounding conversations he was directed to engage in by the Vice President.

Likewise, documents from other agencies that defendant never saw will not provide context for defendant’s grand jury testimony regarding these events. Defendant testified that he did not discuss the CIA employment of Ambassador Wilson’s wife with reporter Judith Miller on July 8, 2003 and that he could not have done so because he had forgotten by that time that he had learned about Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment a month earlier from the Vice President. Nor could such documents explain defendant’s testimony disclaiming having discussed Ms. Wilson’s employment with various other government officials prior to July 10, 2003, or his testimony that he was “taken aback” when journalist Tim Russert asked about Ms. Wilson’s employment with the CIA on July 12, 2003. Accordingly, none of the documents requested by defendant could possibly support the defense that the specific perjury specifications are mere “snippets” of conversation he “may have misremembered.”

Eriposte noticed some oddities on page 23.

[Update: Paul Kiel finds something significant on page 24; see also Josh Marshall.]

This doesn’t mean Bush was in on Plamegate from the beginning, however, and the document doesn’t say that Bush’s authorization was specifically about Joe Wilson. Fitz writes on p. 27:

During this time, while the President was unaware of the role that the Vice President’s Chief of Staff and National Security Adviser had in fact played in disclosing Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment, defendant implored White House officials to have a public statement issued exonerating him.

The righties will make much of that sentence, but they will miss the point. As Waas explained, the President authorized disclosure of sensitive ingelligence to defend his decision to go to war in Iraq. It wouldn’t’ surprise me if Bush were kept out of the loop of the Plame-Wilson smear — it’s the old “plausible deniability” game — but the charge is that Bush authorized release of sensitive intelligence for purely political purposes. I assume this is not illegal — the President can disclose anything he wants [Update: See Josh Marshall on this point.] — but it’s still sleazy.

Waas:

One former senior official said: “They [the leakers] might have tipped people to our eavesdropping capacities, and other serious sources and methods issues. But to what end? The information was never presented to the public because it was bunk in the first place.”

These are the same people who won’t submit to FISA oversight because this might magically permit “the enemy” to know how the NSA conducts its data mining, or whatever it’s doing.

See also: Bob Schieffer rips the White House

“Like tethered goats to the killing fields …”

Sidney Blumenthal has a must-read article in today’s Guardian (emphasis added).

Since the Iraqi elections in January, US foreign service officers at the Baghdad embassy have been writing a steady stream of disturbing cables describing drastically worsening conditions. Violence from incipient communal civil war is rapidly rising. Last month there were eight times as many assassinations committed by Shia militias as terrorist murders by Sunni insurgents. The insurgency, according to the reports, also continues to mutate. Meanwhile, President Bush’s strategy of training Iraqi police and army to take over from coalition forces – “when they stand up, we’ll stand down” – is perversely and portentously accelerating the strife. State department officials in the field are reporting that Shia militias use training as cover to infiltrate key positions. Thus the strategy to create institutions of order and security is fuelling civil war.

Rather than being received as invaluable intelligence, the messages are discarded or, worse, considered signs of disloyalty. Rejecting the facts on the ground apparently requires blaming the messengers. So far, two top attaches at the embassy have been reassigned elsewhere for producing factual reports that are too upsetting.

The Bush administration’s preferred response to increasing disintegration is to act as if it has a strategy that is succeeding.

This is, of course, the way the Bushies have operated since the days Dubya was governor of Texas. But it’s one thing to claim, for example, that Texas tax policies were a success when in fact they were not. Now the Bushies are flushing Iraq, not to mention an incalculable number of lives, down the toilet and calling it victory.

It gets even more amazing …

Under the pretence that Iraq is being pacified, the military is partially withdrawing from hostile towns in the countryside and parts of Baghdad. By reducing the number of soldiers, the administration can claim its policy is working going into the midterm elections. But the jobs the military doesn’t want to perform are being sloughed off on state department “provisional reconstruction teams” (PRTs) led by foreign service officers. The rationale is that they will win Iraqi hearts-and-minds by organising civil functions.

Blood and destruction just to get Republicans elected in a midterm election. Awesome. But, says Blumenthal, the Pentagon has informed the State Department it will not provide security for the foreign service officers. The PRTs are supposed to hire mercenaries if they want protection.

The state department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau was correct in its scepticism before the war about Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMDs, but was ignored. The department was correct in its assessment in its 17-volume Future of Iraq project about the immense effort required for reconstruction after the war, but it was disregarded. Now its reports from Iraq are correct, but their authors are being punished. Foreign service officers are to be sent out like tethered goats to the killing fields. When these misbegotten projects inevitably fail, the department will be blamed. Passive resistance to these assignments reflects anticipation of impending disaster, including the likely murder of diplomats.

But, hey, what’s a few beheaded diplomats if it’ll help win the midterm elections?

Best of all, the Secretary of State has “washed her hands” of her own department. Unfortunately her exceptional skills, most notably her talent for looking straight at a camera and lying her ass off, do not translate into effective management of the State Department. She has handed the task of coaxing diplomats into being tethered goats to an underling while she flits about the world getting her face in the news.

While the state department was racked last week by collapsing morale, Rice travelled to England to visit the constituency of Jack Straw. She declared that though the Bush administration had committed “tactical errors, thousands of them” in Iraq, it is right on the strategy. Then she and Straw took a magic carpet to Baghdad to try to overthrow Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari in favour of a more pliable character.

Juan Cole reports today that the magic carpet ride didn’t help.

Iraqi politicians said on Wednesday that the visit to Iraq of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw had proved counter-productive. Positions actually hardened with the visit. Haider al-Abadi said, “All it’s doing is hardening the position of people who are supporting Jaafari . . . They shouldn’t have come to Baghdad.”

Meanwhile — today Josh White reports in the Washington Post that Rummy has taken offense at Condi’s charge that the U.S. made thousands of tactical errors in Iraq.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he did not know what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was talking about when she said last week that the United States had made thousands of “tactical errors” in handling the war in Iraq, a statement she later said was meant figuratively.

Speaking during a radio interview on WDAY in Fargo, N.D., on Tuesday, Rumsfeld said calling changes in military tactics during the war “errors” reflects a lack of understanding of warfare. Rumsfeld defended his war plan for Iraq but added that such plans inevitably do not survive first contact with the enemy.

Unfortunately, Rummy’s achievements as Secretary of Defense reveal a lack of understanding of the entire bleeping time-space continuum. See also Sadly, No.