Altered States

Rove.
Libby.
Bush.

The list of leakers in this administration goes all the way to the president himself. Can anyone still in control of their rational faculties doubt that there is a case for impeachment?

Alter: Bush’s Purely Political Use of Intel Leaks - Newsweek Politics - MSNBC.com

Feb. 10, 2006 - Poor Porter Goss. First, the longtime Florida congressman leaves his safe seat to become director of the CIA, only to find that he’s been neutered by a new bureaucratic setup where he reports to John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. Then he writes an op-ed piece decrying intelligence leaks in The New York Times on Friday, the exact same day as a story appears identifying today’s biggest leaker of antiterrorism secrets in Washington—President George W. Bush.

For crass political reasons—namely to advance his position on the National Security Agency spying story—the president chose to use a speech to the National Guard Association to disclose details of a 2002 “shoe bomb” plot to blow up the U.S. Bank Tower, the tallest building in Los Angeles. While the plot had been revealed in general terms in the past, the White House this week arranged for Bush’s counterterrorism adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, to explain to reporters in a conference call exactly the kind of details that Goss claimed on the op-ed page helped the enemy. “We are at risk of losing a key battle,” Goss wrote. “The battle to protect our classification system.”

[snip]

Let’s get this straight. The president and administration officials will suddenly talk about details of the foiled plot—details that were highly classified until now. But they won’t say if the controversial NSA program was involved. Given their new willingness to talk at length about the case, can anyone seriously doubt that had the NSA eavesdropping cracked this case, they would have mentioned that? Simply saying that the NSA helped foil the plot—if it had—would not have compromised “sources and methods.” You can bet that if this were an NSA case, we’d know it.

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