United States President George Bush authorised a senior aide to the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, to leak classified intelligence on Iraq to the New York Times reporter Judith Miller, according to court documents made public on Thursday.
The revelations were the first to implicate the president in the scandal surrounding the administration’s campaign to fight back against charges that it exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Lewis ”Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s former chief of staff, told a grand jury that the authorisation from Bush was ”unique in his experience”, according to the court papers, written by the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
The presidential authorisation prompted Libby to disclose the information — taken from the government’s secret National Intelligence Estimate — to Miller at a meeting in July 2003, at the St Regis hotel in Washington DC.
It was during Libby’s several meetings with Miller that he was accused of disclosing the identity of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative married to former US ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Wilson had been sent by the CIA to investigate White House claims that Iraq had tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger, subsequently writing a New York Times article rubbishing the idea.
The White House apparently believed Wilson could be discredited if it could be proved that he was sent on the mission at his wife’s suggestion. Libby resigned as a result of the scandal and faces five charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI, while Miller served 85 days in jail for refusing to reveal her source, though she never wrote about Plame.
There was no suggestion in Thursday’s documents that Bush authorised the leak of Plame’s identity, nor that he committed any crime.
Many of the National Intelligence Estimate’s findings, were officially declassified and made public at a White House briefing 10 days later.
But Bush’s role in the broader damage limitation exercise will be embarrassing given his repeated condemnation of intelligence leakers.
”Leaks of classified information are bad things. We’ve got too much leaking in Washington,” he said in 2004 in connection with the Plame affair. ”I want to know who the leakers are.”
He said anyone in his administration discovered to have leaked the CIA operative’s name would be fired, and insisted that he did not know of ”anybody in my administration who leaked classified information”.
The White House had no immediate comment on Thursday night, but one potential response by the administration may be to argue that Bush’s authorising the release of information automatically renders it declassified. Libby told the grand jury that he had spoken to Cheney’s then-counsel, David Addington, who said that Bush’s permission to release the classified information ”amount to a declassification”.
The vice-president’s office was referring all queries to Fitzgerald’s office.
”The more we hear, the more it is clear this goes way beyond Scooter Libby,” Charles Schumer, New York’s senior senator and a Democrat, said in a statement.
”President Bush and Vice-President Cheney should fully inform the American people of any role in allowing classified information to be leaked.” The chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, said the news showed Bush was willing to leak information for partisan gain, and could ”no longer be trusted to keep America safe”. – Guardian Unlimited Â