Focus of Valerie Plame Probe>Cheney's Staff

uh yeah

Hail to the chief leaker

Bill Press
Tribune Media Services

Poor Patrick Fitzgerald. For two and a half years, ever since being appointed special counsel in December 2003, he has toiled away, trying to find out who the big leaker in the White House is. Is it Karl Rove? Scooter Libby? Ari Fleischer? Harriet Miers?

Poor Patrick Fitzgerald, having to waste all that time and energy. Forget the staff. He should have looked higher. For now we know that the big White House leaker is none other than George W. Bush himself.

According to documents filed by Fitzgerald in the CIA leak case, Scooter Libby admits leaking portions of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) suggesting that Saddam Hussein tried to acquire yellowcake uranium in Niger, as the president famously asserted in his 2003 State of the Union address. But Libby says he leaked that information only after being authorized to do so by the president of the United States. In other words, Bush was the leaker; Libby was his agent.

In a rare departure, Bush does not deny ordering the leak of classified information, but he insists he was only acting in the public interest. Questions were being raised about his yellowcake assertion, notably by Ambassador Joseph Wilson. So Bush said he wanted people to "know the truth." Or, as he explained to students at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies: "I thought it was important for people to get a better sense of why I was saying what I was saying."

In other words, in order to tell the truth, he told a lie. If Bush had really wanted us to know the truth, he would have released the entire NIE - which contained doubts expressed by many in the Pentagon and CIA about Iraq's rumored buying of nuclear materials in Africa. Bush didn't want us to know, for example, of the conclusion reached by the National Intelligence Council after investigating the matter: "The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest." Instead, he ordered the selective leaking of information that would help make his case for war. His motive was not to tell the truth, but to mislead the American people into backing the war in Iraq.

Nor was President Bush acting in the public interest. He was simply trying to crush one of his chief, and most effective, critics. According to Special Counsel Fitzgerald, an op-ed piece by Ambassador Wilson - in which he accused Bush of relying on forged documents when he included Iraq's nuclear ties with Niger in the State of the Union - was "viewed as a direct attack on the credibility of the vice president and the president on a matter of signal importance."

Bush decided to strike back by selectively leaking information, through Libby, to discredit Wilson and by spreading the story that his wife, an undercover CIA agent, had sent him on the African mission in a classic case of nepotism. Fitzgerald concludes: "It is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to punish Wilson."

Wilson was vindicated this week when British newspapers reported that the documents about Saddam's shopping for nuclear materials in Africa were forged by two employees of the Niger embassy in Rome. And Bush was further discredited when the Washington Post reported that a special Pentagon team had informed the White House that Iraq's so-called "mobile weapons labs" had no military purpose whatever - two days before the president announced their discovery on Polish television by claiming: "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

Add it all up. What does it mean? It means the president knew what he was saying was not true, but said it anyway. It means the president deliberately lied to the American people. It means the president also instructed his staff to lie. It means the president was willing to do anything, even break the law and blow the cover of an undercover CIA agent, in order to build support for his unnecessary, unwise and unwinnable war.

If all that doesn't add up to an impeachable offense, I don't know what does.

It shows GWB = Great Walking Buffoon, ran for the Presidency not to serve the people but to be served by the people so he could be like a king i.e. above the law.