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A Legitimate Gripe - White House Info. Sharing
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| MisterOpus1 |
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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| MisterOpus1 |
More evidence of this Administration witholding info:
| quote: | September 16, 2004
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
Judge Orders U.S. to Release Files on Abu Ghraib
By JULIA PRESTON
federal judge in New York, complaining that the Bush administration "shows an indifference" to the freedom of information laws, has ordered the Pentagon and other agencies to produce a list of all their documents on the detentions at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by Oct. 15.
The ruling, issued yesterday by Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in Federal District Court in Manhattan, came in a suit filed July 2 by the American Civil Liberties Union. The group sued after the federal government failed to provide any relevant documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request it made on Oct. 7, 2003.
The request was for documents about the treatment and deaths of detainees while in United States custody in Iraq, among other subjects. The group provided a list of 70 priority documents, all of which were mentioned in public reports or press accounts.
In his ruling, Judge Hellerstein wrote that the "glacial pace" of the government's response "fails to afford the accountability of government" that the freedom of information laws require. On Aug. 17 the judge had ordered the government to start producing the 70 documents, but none have been released.
"If the documents are more of an embarrassment than a secret, the public should know of our government's treatment of individuals captured and held abroad," he wrote.
He stopped short of ordering the Pentagon to turn over the actual documents by the October deadline, after Assistant United States Attorney Sean Lane argued at a hearing on Friday that there were too many of them - at least 20,000, he said - to produce that soon. Mr. Lane said that many of the Pentagon's documents could not be released for national security reasons, and that the agency was working to identify those it would seek to withhold.
The Pentagon offered to produce a list of its relevant documents by February. In imposing the Oct. 15 deadline, Judge Hellerstein said the federal agencies could make a separate, sealed list for classified documents they did not want to release. But he required the government to give an explanation for each document it would not release.
Jameel Jaffer, a staff lawyer for the group, said that the ruling was "a huge step forward" and would allow the group to begin court challenges to force the release of the documents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/16/p...=print&position |
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| LiquidX |
| Sometimes this things just makes me puke on how some of this things are handled by the government! |
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| imokruok |
| It works both ways. Democrats leak stuff from the intelligence committees all of the time. Rockefeller needs to STFU and get his own office under control. |
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