{"id":7076,"date":"2006-04-07T09:10:18","date_gmt":"2006-04-07T13:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7076"},"modified":"2006-04-07T09:10:18","modified_gmt":"2006-04-07T13:10:18","slug":"a-one-man-declassification-machine-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/a-one-man-declassification-machine-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"A one-man declassification machine — Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

The papers are filled this morning with analysis from legal experts on the [tag]president[\/tag]’s apparent decision to authorize<\/a> [tag]Scooter Libby[\/tag] to leak portions of the classified National Intelligence Estimate to the New York Times. The consensus seems to be that, as a legal matter, [tag]Bush[\/tag] can [tag]declassify[\/tag] whatever he wants<\/a>, whenever he wants<\/a>. In other words, it’s all but impossible for the president to leak [tag]classified[\/tag] information because if he’s leaking information, the information is necessarily declassified, by virtue of the power Bush gave himself. (It’s quite a racket he’s got going…)<\/p>\n

I’m not in a position to dispute this analysis; I just don’t know enough about this area of the law. But there are still two principal problems with the argument — one practical, one political. (I’ve decided to break them up into two separate posts, just to make things easier.)<\/p>\n

One, as Atrios noted<\/a>, is the way in which this particular [tag]declassification[\/tag] process was handled helps demonstrate how little sense it makes.<\/p>\n

It’s probably reasonable that the president can declassify whatever he wants<\/a>, or at least I haven’t really seen an especially strong argument to the contrary, but that doesn’t mean that the president can declassify stuff, show it to Judy Miller, and then turn around claim the stuff is still classified<\/a>. That’s where this argument falls apart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Quite right. In this controversy, this wasn’t a straightforward example of the president simply declassifying information he no longer needed to keep secret; this was an example of him selectively leaking misleading information as part of a deceptive argument for war. The Bush [tag]White House[\/tag] then announced, two years later<\/i>, that [tag]Congress[\/tag] couldn’t see the same leaked information because, you guessed it, it was classified.<\/p>\n

Moreover, as Kevin noted<\/a>, the other practical inconsistency is that the same White House that says Bush can declassify on a whim also acts as if he can’t.
\n<\/p>\n

[tag]Cheney[\/tag] and Bush and Addington all supposedly believed they could declassify the NIE on Bush’s say-so, but for some reason they continued with the normal declassification process anyway. In fact, “Defendant testified in the grand jury that he understood that even in the days following his conversation with Ms. Miller, other key officials — including Cabinet level officials — were not made aware of the earlier declassification even as those officials were pressed to carry out a declassification of the NIE.” It was just a private little declassification between the three of them that even Karl Rove didn’t know about.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, this doesn’t make sense. Documents are either declassified or they’re not, and the president can either declassify them with a mere verbal flick of his wrist or he can’t. Which is it?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The fact that the Bush gang hasn’t figured this out yet isn’t a good sign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The papers are filled this morning with analysis from legal experts on the [tag]president[\/tag]’s apparent decision to authorize [tag]Scooter Libby[\/tag] to leak portions of the classified National Intelligence Estimate to the New York Times. The consensus seems to be that, as a legal matter, [tag]Bush[\/tag] can [tag]declassify[\/tag] whatever he wants, whenever he wants. In other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7076\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}