[backhoe]

Use the links:

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/a rchives/006694.php
Still Crying Over The Lost Fitzmas
I understand how disappointing it was to the BDS
sufferers that Fitzmas turned into Fizzlemas, but this report is just another
non-story in a controversy full of them.

The New York Sun reported today that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has testified
that he released information from a
National Intelligence Estimate in 2003 to a reporter prior to its publication.
Predictably, the media and the blogosphere has overreacted, proving once again
that most people do not understand classified materials, unclassified materials,
and the process used to classify documents...Austin Bay: "So what’s the story
here? That someone who worked in the White House selectively passed properly
declassified material to the press? That’s not a scandal; that’s Beltway
business as usual...Power
Line: "This is the same "scandal" the press tried to sell a few months ago.
I wrote about it
here...David
Ensor at
CNN:If the
president decides to declassify information, he has that legal right. So, it's
not about a law being broken here, and it's not about Valerie Plame-Wilson's
name.

UPDATE: Once again, the President has the authority
to declassify materials at his discretion, a point hammered home by the
Washington Post as well:  
Comments
(43) 

[Waco]

Vanity Fair/Wilson outer her,,,so Bush was late, late, late,,,Pissonya MSM!

[Always Right]

I my, Bush has alledgedly done something 'unusual'????? This is series.

[syriacus]

FWIW... Tony Snow was just on Fox and Friends. He said the word "classified" is not used in the Fitzgerald papers. Snow says the papers only say that information (from the National Intelligence Estimate?) was released. Fitzgerald does not specifically say that "classified" information was released.

[mtntop3]

Release through Libby of classified information which showed that Saddam had, indeed, sought to purchase ore for nuclear weapon purposes (contrary to Joseph Wilson's misinformation) was necessary to emphatically support national security through making evident the threat to that security, i.e., the true and highly lethal intentions of Saddam.

To have left standing Wilson's pathetic - and dangerous - misrepresentations would have been irresponsible and in effect allowing that (deliberately) wrongful information to circulate and be accepted as true.

NPR's Nina Totenberg this morning showed the liberals take on this: she tried to connect it to the markedly dissimilar instance of the media (NY Times) making public the secret national security policy of monitoring calls to, and from abroad, to terrorist suspects in the U. S. THAT publication of classified info was justified, Nina implied - no matter that it constituted a breaching of a major national security program that protected every one of us: man, woman, and child. She and all her kind are national security threats themselves.

[Loyal Buckeye]

The old 'if it isn't legal, it's unusual' trick.

[stylin19a]

Is Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald (or the court he applied to ?) allowed to make grand jury testimony public ?

[r9etb]

The unspoken rationale for the leak is that the Democrats and their stooges are just another front in the WOT, who must be fought if we're going to win it.