Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 04/09/06 11:09 am:
which charge against Bush are you levelling this time ?

Clarification/Follow-up by Erewhon on 04/09/06 1:59 pm:

You seem to know of so many! This one is Bush's leak about classified information pertaining to national secuirity.

It will be dealt with in the news programmes this weekend, unless I am mistaken.

Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 04/10/06 6:18 pm:
Ron ;the NIE or most parts of it gets released to the public all the time . There is NO NEWS in the fact that Bush authorized it's release. The only news is that Bush released it earlier than July 18 ,2003 . He released it 10 days earlier and Libby went with it to Judy Miller . Miller never reported on it .The Knight Ridder headline on July 19, 2003 was: "Bush Releases Excerpts of Top-Secret Iraq Report." Heck ,he even included the minority opinion in the estimate by the Powell State Dept.

Bush can't win ;one day he is accused of having a secretive adm. and when he releases info. he is doing something wrong. Further ;Fitzgerald states that Bush did nothing wrong in the release of the NIE.

Bush should state on the record :

1) The president is authorized to release (not "leak") the info


2) The info that WAS released proved Joe Wilson was lying.

3) The administration had not only the right but the duty to correct the record. Wilson reported back to the CIA that Iraq HAD contacted Nigerian officials. He then went to the NY Slimes and said the opposite. Seeing false info becoming entrenched, the only responsible thing to do was to release the information that would refute Wilson's lies.The Senate Intelligence report concluded that Joe Wilson was a liar and the Niger Yellowcake issue was MORE not less important than even the UK and US administrations had made out.

Clarification/Follow-up by Itsdb on 04/10/06 7:45 pm:
Oh, THAT little rift. Why didn't you just say so? Ronnie, what is there to lie his way out of? Even that most liberal of media institutions the Washington Post called it a "good leak."

"PRESIDENT BUSH was right (never thought I'd read that here) to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do. But the administration handled the release clumsily, exposing Mr. Bush to the hyperbolic charges of misconduct and hypocrisy that Democrats are leveling.

Rather than follow the usual declassification procedures and then invite reporters to a briefing -- as the White House eventually did -- Vice President Cheney initially chose to be secretive, ordering his chief of staff at the time, I. Lewis Libby, to leak the information to a favorite New York Times reporter. The full public disclosure followed 10 days later. There was nothing illegal or even particularly unusual about that; nor is this presidentially authorized leak necessarily comparable to other, unauthorized disclosures that the president believes, rightly or wrongly, compromise national security.

Clarification/Follow-up by ETWolverine on 04/10/06 8:15 pm:
Ronnie,

>>>NIE ring a bell?<<<

You obviously didn't read my response. I specifically stated that the information that Libby "leaked" wasn't a leak at all, because it was contained in the NIE that was published for PUBLIC CONSUMPTION a full 9 months earlier.

Elliot