"I wanted people to see the truth and thought it made sense for people to see the truth," Bush said on Monday during a speech at Johns Hopkins University."You're not supposed to talk about classified information, and so I declassified the document. I thought it was important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches. And I felt I could do so without jeopardizing ongoing intelligence matters, and so I did."
The document in question, the NIE, or National Intelligence Estimate, that was leaked in order to prop up the case for war included the following assertations:
- An Iraqi capability to deliver biological weapons, and the capacity for continued production.
- Iraq was in possession of "at least 100 metric tons of chemical weapons).
- Iraq had unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering those weapons.
- Numerous other cases where the report issued to Congress had all of the caveats, qualifications, and dissensions edited out to promote a sense of urgency regarding the threat.
This is going to end up being a whole bunch of semantic parsing and wordplay, based on the assumption that the president (and Cheney by writ of Executive Order) can declassify information at will, based on the Nixonian edict that "when the President does it, it's not illegal". Small problem with that, though. The leak happened before July 8th, 2003, and Press Secretary Scott McClellan stated that is was declassified on July 18th, 2003. Me thinks that the phrase, "It all depends on what "is" is" is going to get some reuse. It's plainly obvious that all of our leaders "leak" information when it suits their political agenda. Somebody needs to start sending Depends to the White House.
So, reread his rationale, because the "truth" he wants to show us isn't true at all.
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