"Gus" wrote in message
oups.com...

Hawke wrote:

Well, nobody in the White House is denying the allegations and their
spokesman Scott McClellan was telling everyone at the press conference
today
that the leaking of classified information by Bush was legal. The reason
for
that is because anytime the president decides to give out classified
information that automatically makes it declassified because as
president
he's authorized to declassify information simply due to his position as
president. However, by making this excuse and admitting he was the
source of
the leak to the NY Times he's also admitting the allegations by Libby
are
true. Unfortunately for him, it also means he's guilty of lying when he
said
he wouldn't tolerate leaks in his administration and anyone that did it
would be dealt with appropriately. I guess he meant that to apply to
everyone but himself.

Hawke

Information gets declassified all the time and released to the public
but it isn't called a "leak". Could it be that the leak label is used
to make a normal occurrence sound sinister?
GW

Maybe it sounds sinister because the "declassification" was not made known
to anyone but Judith Miller of the NY Times. Therefore, the information was
"planted" in the Times by the Bush administration in order to counteract Joe
Wilson's rebuttal of Bush's claim that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger. If
the declassified information was simply made public no one would have
thought anything of it. But the fact that it was surreptitiously let out and
was done so in order to foster Bush's political agenda is more than enough
for a reasonable person to believe that it was indeed "leaked" information
and was not simply a dissemination of declassified information to the
public. When you do something sneaky there is usually a reason for it an not
usually a good one. Clearly Bush was trying to pull one off here but Libby's
testimony in court exposed his duplicity.

Hawke