Libby Traces Approval of Disclosure Back to Bush
"George Bush personally authorized leaking long-classified information to a reporter in the summer of 2003 to buttress administration claims, now discredited, that Saddam Hussein was attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction for Iraq, according to a court filing by prosecutors in the case against former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was indicted in October on charges that he lied to investigators about his role in the unmasking of former CIA operative Valerie Plame. Court papers filed by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald late Wednesday said that before Libby's indictment, he told a federal grand jury investigating the leak that Cheney told him to pass on information about a secret National Intelligence Estimate to the press and that Bush had authorized the disclosure.George Bush practically leaps from his desk and orders Dick Cheney to have Scooter Libby call his New York Times’ source, Judy Miller, and ‘leak’ the highly classified National Intelligence Estimate’s (NIE) report on Iraq’s 'weapons of mass destruction'. And although the NIE report had been refuted by two other agencies, Bush and Cheney knew it would sow doubt in the op-ed piece Joe Wilson had written in the NY Times just two days earlier. The president of the United States leaking classified information to some two-bit ho mole at the NY Times. That scenario was laid-out by Scooter Libby before the federal grand jury. Either Libby is lying or George Bush was lying and, more importantly, now been proven to be a source of leaking coming out of the White House. There has been no denial from the White House on this leak coming from Bush. The initial defense seems to be to that it didn’t have anything to do with the Valerie Plame investigation. What? Are we to believe that Bush ordered Libby to leak the NIE information to Judy Milller in his vain attempt to discredit Joe Wilson, but didn’t know anything about the leak from Libby, to the very same source, about Wilson’s wife? Come on. How goddamn dumb do you have to be to believe that?
