[Mb-civic] Bush Authorized Secrets' Release, Libby Testified - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Bush Authorized Secrets' Release, Libby Testified
Prosecutor Says Disclosures on Iraq Were Aimed at War Critic

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 7, 2006; A01

President Bush authorized White House official I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby 
to disclose highly sensitive intelligence information to the news media 
in an attempt to discredit a CIA adviser whose views undermined the 
rationale for the invasion of Iraq, according to a federal prosecutor's 
account of Libby's testimony to a grand jury.

The court filing by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first 
time places Bush and Vice President Cheney at the heart of what Libby 
testified was an exceptional and deliberate leak of material designed to 
buttress the administration's claim that Iraq was trying to obtain 
nuclear weapons. The information was contained in the National 
Intelligence Estimate, one of the most closely held CIA analyses of 
whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the war.

Fitzgerald said Libby's disclosure took place as the result of "a strong 
desire by many, including multiple people in the White House, to 
repudiate" claims made in a July 2003 newspaper article by former 
ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was hired by the CIA to evaluate 
whether Iraq sought nuclear material in Niger. Wilson wrote that "some 
of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was 
twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

The White House did not challenge the prosecutor's account of Bush's and 
Cheney's role in orchestrating the effort to discredit Wilson yesterday. 
Both Bush and Cheney have been interviewed by Fitzgerald, but the 
details of what they told him are unknown. Fitzgerald's new account is 
based on Libby's grand jury testimony that Cheney told him Bush had 
authorized the declassification and disclosure of some of the information.

Bush has been a major critic of leaks of classified information, and his 
aides have repeatedly said they want to "get to the bottom" of who 
leaked the name of Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, to 
the media, which touched off Fitzgerald's investigation . But in the 
past 33 months the White House has never disclosed Bush's apparent 
involvement in the deliberate disclosure of information meant to 
undermine Wilson.

Three months before Fitzgerald began his probe in December 2003, Bush 
said at a news conference that "I've constantly expressed my displeasure 
with leaks, particularly leaks of classified information. . . . If 
there's a leak out of the administration, I want to know who it is. And 
if a person has violated law, the person will be taken care of."

Fitzgerald has not charged anyone with wrongdoing in the initial leak of 
Plame's name. In the new filing, he did not allege that Bush authorized 
that disclosure, and he said Bush was "unaware of the role" that Libby, 
then Cheney's chief of staff, played in discussing her name with a 
number of reporters.

The revelation of Bush's role in the disclosure effort set off an 
intense political debate yesterday over the propriety of the White 
House's use of intelligence information to undermine a critic. 
Democratic lawmakers lined up to demand that Bush explain his 
involvement in an affair they called unprecedented.

"If the disclosure is true, it's breathtaking. The president is revealed 
as the leaker-in-chief," said Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the senior 
Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Legal scholars and analysts said yesterday that the president has the 
authority to selectively declassify intelligence reports But they also 
said it was highly unusual for senior officials at the White House to 
take such an action so stealthily, without notifying Cabinet officials 
or others in the administration, including the CIA authors of the 
National Intelligence Estimate.

According to Fitzgerald's account, Libby believed that only he, Bush and 
Cheney knew about the calculated disclosure. Even Stephen J. Hadley, 
then the deputy national security adviser, was kept in the dark, and he 
wasted efforts trying separately to "declassify what Mr. Libby testified 
had already been declassified." Libby, meanwhile, told the reporters he 
contacted that the declassified information could not be attributed to him.

Fitzgerald's disclosure, in a document he filed in U.S. District Court 
here at 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, came in the midst of a legal battle 
over Libby's demand for wide access to materials related to Fitzgerald's 
continuing investigation.

Libby, who was indicted last year for allegedly lying to the FBI and a 
grand jury about what he said to reporters about his contacts with the 
media, wants the materials because he thinks they will show that his 
misstatements were innocent and did not stem from an orchestrated 
administration campaign to discredit Wilson, according to his court filings.

Fitzgerald's brief uses unusually strong language to rebut this claim. 
In light of the grand jury testimony, the prosecutor said, "it is hard 
to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the 
existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson."

Plame's name was disclosed in a July 2003 syndicated column by Robert D. 
Novak. Disclosing the identity of an undercover CIA officer can be a 
felony in certain circumstances. Fitzgerald has subpoenaed dozens of 
federal officials and reporters so far and concluded that Libby and 
several others in the administration discussed Plame's CIA role with 
reporters.

He also said in the new filing he was withholding information from 
Libby's legal team related to "other subjects of the investigation," 
including other administration officials. Fitzgerald disclosed that he 
does not intend to seek testimony at Libby's trial from Hadley or White 
House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, whose roles in rebutting Wilson's 
article have been under scrutiny.

Unlike the statement exonerating Bush, no statement is made in the 
filing about whether Cheney played a role in the leak of Plame's name. 
Cheney is depicted as acutely interested in and dismissive of what 
Wilson wrote as the result of a trip he took to Niger, where he was sent 
by the CIA to probe claims that Iraq had attempted to acquire nuclear 
weapons materials.

Cheney, Fitzgerald said, "expressed concerns to defendant [Libby] 
regarding whether Mr. Wilson's trip was legitimate or whether it was in 
effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife." Leaking the latter 
scenario to the press, the prosecutor said, had the effect of 
undercutting Wilson's credibility by making it seem as if he "received 
the assignment [to visit Niger] on account of nepotism."

Fitzgerald's filing states that Cheney advised Libby "the President had 
specifically authorized defendant to disclose certain information" from 
the CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, an analysis of 
Iraq's ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

That NIE contained information that Bush and Cheney felt would rebut 
Wilson's claims about the exaggeration of Iraq's nuclear threat. "The 
evidence will show," Fitzgerald wrote, "that the July 6, 2003 Op Ed by 
Mr. Wilson 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."

Libby, he wrote, was essentially dispatched to rebut this attack the 
following week. According to Fitzgerald's account, Libby considered this 
task unusual and initially protested "because of the classified nature 
of the NIE." But Cheney -- at some later date, not specified in the 
court filing -- "advised him that the President had authorized" 
disclosures from that document.

Libby also testified that the vice president's legal counsel, David S. 
Addington, "opined that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose 
a document amounted to declassification of the document." The date that 
Addington offered this advice to Libby is not specified in Fitzgerald's 
account.

The exclusive venue for the rebuttal effort was meant to be the New York 
Times, where then-reporter Judith Miller had written a number of 
articles that highlighted Iraq's nuclear ambitions. Libby met with 
Miller at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington two days after the Wilson 
article was published, and he brought a brief abstract of the National 
Intelligence Estimate's key judgments.

"Defendant testified that this July 8th meeting was the only time he 
recalled in his government experience when he disclosed a document to a 
reporter that was effectively declassified by the President's 
authorization that it be disclosed." But Libby said he and Cheney agreed 
that it was "very important" for the NIE's conclusions to be disclosed.

Libby told Miller, among other things, that the NIE concluded Iraq was 
"vigorously trying to procure uranium," according to Fitzgerald's 
filing. In fact, the CIA did not believe this allegation, which came 
from the Defense Intelligence Agency and remains unproved to this day, 
according to intelligence analysts.

Libby told investigators that he never mentioned Plame's name in this 
conversation, but the grand jury indicted him on charges of lying about 
this.

Miller did not write an article about the information in the National 
Intelligence Estimate and Fitzgerald has asserted that Cheney authorized 
Libby four days later to talk about "the NIE and Mr. Wilson" to other 
reporters. On that day, Fitzgerald said, Libby discussed Plame's CIA 
employment for the first time with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper 
and for the third time with Miller.

Cooper wrote an article repeating what Novak had disclosed about Plame, 
though Miller never did.

Once the disclosure of Plame's name became the target of an 
investigation, Libby "implored White House officials" to issue a 
statement exonerating him, according to Fitzgerald's account. When he 
was rebuffed, Libby requested that Cheney intervene. He also wrote a 
draft statement by hand, asserting that he "did not leak classified 
information."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan instead issued a more guarded 
statement, under pressure from Cheney, that Libby and Rove "assured me 
they were not involved in this," according to Fitzgerald's account. But 
as Libby approached his first FBI interview, Fitzgerald said, he knew 
the White House had "publicly staked its credibility on there being no 
White House involvement in the leaking of information about Mrs. Wilson" 
and that the president had vowed to fire leakers.

In that context, Fitzgerald said Libby lied about what he said to 
reporters and "repeated the story in a subsequent interview and during 
two grand jury appearances."

Libby's legal team is slated to file its reply to the filing next 
Wednesday. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence would not 
comment publicly on the status of the classified NIE yesterday.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/06/AR2006040600333.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060407/e26416e8/attachment-0001.htm