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)
On July 18, 2003, the administration, facing criticism for the intelligence used to justify the war, declassified an eight-page part of the NIE dubbed "key judgments" and conducted a lengthy background briefing with reporters to discuss it.“Key judgments" is the operative word here, the “key judgements” documents were not declassified in July of 2003, they were declassified in October of 2002, six days after the NIE was complete per the following information:
On October 7, 2002 DCI Tenet sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee declassifying portions of its new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.
Another article:
A 25-page version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was released in October 2002. It made clear-cut statements about Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons capabilities in two pages of "Key Judgments."A copy of the Key Judgments document can be found here. Warning: .pdf file.
As usual, the MSM gets it wrong.