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A Legitimate Gripe - White House Info. Sharing
I think there is some substance behind Rockefeller's argument here. It's well known just how locked down and secretive this Administration is, yet it seemingly quite easy for them to hand out top secret documents to journalists IF it suits their partisan interests:
| quote: | September 10, 2004
Democrat Lodges Complaints Over Leaks From Bush Camp
By JAMES RISEN
ASHINGTON - The ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee has charged that senior Bush administration officials have disclosed classified information to a prominent journalist "for partisan purposes," sending a message to government officials that leaks "receive blessings from the very top."
In two stinging letters to the Central Intelligence Agency, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, complained that administration officials had provided a "torrent" of classified information to the journalist, Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, for his 2002 book "Bush at War."
In letters written in March and again this month, Mr. Rockefeller questioned why the disclosure of so much classified information had not been taken more seriously. In March, Mr. Rockefeller asked the agency whether it had considered issuing a criminal referral to the Justice Department to investigate the disclosures. The letter included a series of passages from the book that Mr. Rockefeller cited as potential examples of the disclosure of classified information.
The agency has issued referrals to the Justice Department in other recent cases, but not in connection with Mr. Woodward's book.
In his letter in March to the agency's director then, George J. Tenet, Mr. Rockefeller argued that "senior administration officials" appear to have engaged in "a brazen effort to exploit highly classified information for partisan purposes." He added that the disclosures of so much information for Mr. Woodward's book "send a message, whether in the White House or elsewhere in the government, that leaks of classified information receive blessings from the very top.''
In a letter sent in response in June, the agency's director of Congressional affairs, Stanley M. Moskowitz, said the agency had no intention of referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment further on the matter.
In a Sept. 1 response to the C.I.A., Mr. Rockefeller said he found its response "completely unacceptable."
Mr. Woodward declined to comment on the record.
"Bush at War" was Mr. Woodward's first book about the Bush administration and focused on the performance of President Bush and his advisers in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and during the war in Afghanistan.
In the book, Mr. Woodward wrote that he had been given access to contemporaneous notes taken "during more than 50 National Security Council and other meetings." He also said he had interviewed "more than 100 people involved in the decision making and execution of the war, including President Bush, key war cabinet members, the White House staff, and officials currently serving at various levels of the Defense and State Departments and the C.I.A."
This year, Mr. Woodward followed up "Bush At War" with "Plan of Attack," a book that chronicled the administration's performance as it headed to war in Iraq. Mr. Rockefeller's letters did not deal with "Plan of Attack."
The letters reflect growing pique among Congressional Democrats about what they describe as a double standard applied by the Bush administration to the handling of secret information. Several lawmakers were particularly angry after the White House pushed for an investigation in 2002 of the joint Congressional committee that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks following a leak of the content of Al Qaeda communications intercepted by the National Security Agency just before the attacks on New York and Washington.
Vice President Dick Cheney criticized Congress for the disclosures, and called the House and Senate chairmen of the joint committee about the matter. The F.B.I. was called in to conduct an investigation. Senator Richard C. Shelby, an Alabama Republican, was eventually identified as the likely source of the leak, but the criminal case was dropped and the matter was referred to the Senate Ethics Committee.
Another criminal investigation has been under way into the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, in a case tinged with partisan politics. Ms. Plame is the wife of a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the agency to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein's government had sought to buy uranium.
Mr. Wilson later became an outspoken opponent of the Bush administration, which he says exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. Ms. Plame's identity was disclosed in 2003 to a conservative columnist, Robert Novak. The investigation into the disclosure is continuing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/10/p...=print&position |
Normally I'd chalk it up to typical partisan politics, but when it comes to top secret info., the partisanship SHOULD cease.
Edit: case in point:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040914/pl_afp/us_bush_report_politics_040914223324
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Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...
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