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Bush's Final Jeopardy
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
Jim Hightower, Raising Hell
Jonathan Rowe
Democracy and Elections:
Are Feds Trying to Aid Republican Candidate's Election?
Tim Kalich
DrugReporter:
A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom
Lux
Election 2008:
The Real Elitist: Video of McCain's Collection of Mansions Reveal He's Not Your Average Joe
Steven Greenhouse
Environment:
Republicans Have Handed Democrats a Winning Election Issue
David Morris
ForeignPolicy:
Blocking a Gazan's Path to an Education
Fidaa Abed
Health and Wellness:
The Misshapen Mind: How the Brain's Haphazard Evolution Left Us with Self-Destructive Instincts
Sasha Abramsky
Hurricane Katrina:
From the Bayou to Baghdad: Mission Not Accomplished
Amy Goodman
Immigration:
Medical Neglect in Immigrant Prisons Reveals America at Its Worst
Kyle Hussein de Beausset
Media and Technology:
What's Going on with the Media's Ballooning Coverage of Celebrity Babies?
Meredith Blake
Movie Mix:
Protest over Use of the Word 'Retard' in Stiller's 'Tropic Thunder' Misses the Target
Annabelle Gurwitch
Reproductive Justice and Gender:
Why Obama Should Pick Hillary
Lanny Davis
Rights and Liberties:
Stop the Execution: Jeff Wood Faces Death Tomorrow for a Murder He Didn't Commit
Liliana Segura
Sex and Relationships:
Catching the Wrong John: When Are the Media Going to Talk about John McCain's Infidelity?
Drew Westen
War on Iraq:
How Many More Iraqis Can You Throw Behind Bars Without Trial?
Fatih Abdulsalam
Water:
What If Your Tap Water Is Not Safe To Drink?
Elizabeth Royte
The latest in a parade of horrors emanating from the Bush administration appeared Thursday in the form of a revelation buried in papers filed in federal court by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in his investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, now under indictment on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, told the Grand Jury Fitzgerald convened that President Bush had -- via Vice President Cheney -- authorized him to disclose selected information from a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, which he did during a private breakfast meeting at the St. Regis Hotel on July 8, 2003.
On Friday, in a press conference that bore a striking similarity to Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" routine, President Bush's spokesman Scott McClellan dutifully responded to reporters' questions about the disclosure. No, the increasingly robotic McClellan said, the White House will not comment on an ongoing case. But, he assured the assembled journalists, the President can declassify whatever he wants, whenever he wants, however he wants. So, McClellan implied, it would have been perfectly legal for the President to have taken this action, which he could not, of course, comment on because this was an ongoing case (and so on).
Thus has begun a debate in our media whose starting questions usually run along the lines of: "Is what the President did legal?" or "Does the President have authority to declassify information at will?" (Given the President's failure to deny Libby's allegation, it has largely been accepted as true.) The answer to those questions has generally been: Yes, the President -- as chief executive -- has the authority to declassify information at will.
But it is not only in the TV game show world of Jeopardy! that the correct answer to a problem depends on the question asked. And, as it happens, those are simply not the right questions.
In order to decide what legal issues arise from a given set of facts -- in other words, in order to frame the right questions -- we first have to determine what the facts are. This is what we know, in summary, about the CIA leak case. We know that Valerie Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson had been an extremely painful thorn in the side of the Bush administration long before he wrote the infamous July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed that Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald described as having been 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."
In March of 2003, Wilson had become increasingly vocal in questioning the administration's reasons for war. In a Nation article and a March 2 appearance on CNN, as well as a March 4 panel on Ted Koppel's Nightline, Wilson argued that the White House wanted to invade Iraq, not because of weapons of mass destruction, but because it wanted to redraw the map of the Middle East. Wilson's criticisms coincided with those of David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, who was questioning the President's false and misleading arguments that aluminum tubes intercepted en route to Iraq had been meant for an Iraqi nuclear program.
Fueling the fire, on March 7, Mohammed El Baradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had flatly declared that there was no evidence the Iraqis were reconstituting a nuclear-weapons program, pointing out that neither the aluminum tubes claim nor the attempted-purchase-of-uranium-in-Niger claim were valid. Indeed, El Baradei explained, the documents relating to an attempted purchase of uranium were obvious forgeries. The next day, a "senior administration official" was quoted in the Washington Post as saying in response to El Baradei's statement, "We fell for it." Then Wilson appeared again on CNN and said, essentially, that the senior administration official was either lying or incompetent because analysts from several different intelligence agencies already knew of the forgeries.
Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor. Her pieces have appeared in The Nation, the L.A. Times, Salon, and Mother Jones.
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