Leaking All Over Us

The Philadelphia Inquirer concocted this gem of an editorial on 4/13.

Editorial Out of saddle, into puddle

It was refreshing, in a sense, to hear President Bush come out in favor of government leaks.

Of course, when you're the president and you specifically authorized the leak, you don't call it "leaking." You speak of truth-telling.

"I wanted people to see the truth," Bush said Monday in defending his decision to release a secret government report in 2003 about whether Iraq sought to obtain uranium for nuclear weapons.

Whether the President's leak offered people the truth, as opposed to politically expedient spin, is an open question. But Bush's admission that he personally authorized this disclosure should induce him to dismount the high horse he has been riding about leaks.

The President and other top officials have expressed indignation at leaks that reflected poorly on the administration. When news surfaced about secret CIA prisons holding suspected terrorists in eight countries, including in Eastern Europe, it spawned government investigations into how the information got out, and threats to throw reporters in jail. When the media reported that the President had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a warrant on U.S. citizens, Bush said the disclosure helped our enemies. More probes began.

Let's acknowledge some basic truths. All presidents leak at one time or another. All presidents wax indignant when someone else's leak embarrasses them.

Remember when President Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998 to retaliate for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa? Critics accused Clinton of bombing an aspirin factory so he could look "presidential" during the Monica Lewinsky furor. Administration officials soon leaked the news that the CIA had taken soil samples revealing traces of a potential nerve gas agent at the plant.

I’ll get to that in a minute.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan claims a distinction between disseminating declassified information "in the public interest" and leaking sensitive, classified national intelligence. Of course, in this case the information was declassified only because the President wanted it leaked. The question remains whether the leaks about Iraq and uranium were aimed at the public interest or the President's political interests. Then, as now, Bush was under fire for misleading the country into war.

As for the truth on Iraq's WMD program, that's still a moving target.

No it isn’t. Remember the Duelfer report from two years ago? Apparently the Inquirer has forgotten.

The Washington Post just reported that U.S. investigators had concluded on May 29, 2003, that those infamous "mobile biological laboratories" found in Iraq had nothing to do with weapons. One expert called them "the biggest sand toilets in the world."

The team transmitted its finding to Washington two days before the President declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." That's more uncomfortable news for a wartime president. Can another leak be far behind?

Ultimately, I have no idea what the hell this editorial is all about. Is the Inquirer seriously trying to equate the outing of Valerie Plame with bombing ordered by President Clinton on a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan which may or may not have been making chemical weapons? Please tell me whose cover was blown when Clinton ordered the attack. I must have missed that bit of detail when the story first broke.

If you want to blame Clinton for this, you could do it because the attack may have been based on outdated intelligence, and it also may have come at a time when we were still negotiating to get bin Laden (and of course, we did not know at the time that Unocal was negotiating with the Taliban to build the trans-Afghani pipeline, as noted here…given that those sensitive business negotiations were underway, how could that NOT end up undercutting any punitive effort on our part against the Taliban in Afghanistan? We can’t both get their money and punish them at the same time.).

This is the Viewzone excerpt I’m referring to so you don’t have to scroll through everything.

2. December 4, 1997 - Representatives of the Taliban are invited guests to the Texas headquarters of Unocal to negotiate their support for the pipeline. Subsequent reports will indicate that the negotiations failed, allegedly because the Taliban wanted too much money. [Source: The BBC, Dec. 4, 1997]

3. February 12, 1998 - Unocal Vice President John J. Maresca - later to become a Special Ambassador to Afghanistan - testifies before the House that until a single, unified, friendly government is in place in Afghanistan the trans-Afghani pipeline needed to monetize the oil will not be built. [Source: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee.]

And I LOVE the trivial way they end the editorial by stating in effect, “Oh, Bush willingly lied AGAIN about these supposed mobile labs which were empty trailers; just keep leaking, sir.”

What a wondrous editorial hallmark for Philadelphia’s supposed “newspaper of record.” I guess this is the Inky’s way of parroting the new editorial policy of the Washington Post in which Deborah Howell and Jim Brady believe that the reporters must report, but the editorial writers can do anything they want (or, as Howell states so sanctimoniously here, "news stories are to inform, editorials are to influence").