Employing selective secrecy

[Doondoo]

The Bush administration is keen on secrecy, and it makes no apologies for that policy. It believes in keeping a tight hold on information unless it has a good reason not to. Since it took office, the number of decisions to classify documents has soared, while the process of declassifying old secrets has slowed drastically. All this has been necessary, in the administration's view, to protect national security in time of war.

But it is not incapable of opening up to the public when it has sufficient motivation--as we have learned in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. And when the White House decides to declassify secrets, it can do so with head-spinning alacrity. One such occasion came when former Ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote an article for The New York Times accusing the administration of distorting intelligence information to make its case for the invasion of Iraq.

That charge forced the White House to acknowledge that the president's 2003 State of the Union address contained false information about Saddam Hussein's supposed efforts to obtain uranium for nuclear weapons from the African nation of Niger. But it also spurred high administration officials to try to discredit Wilson and to debunk claims that he had earlier gone to Niger at the behest of the vice president.

What did the White House do? Libby and other aides informed several reporters that Wilson was married to CIA operative Valerie Plame--suggesting that he had been picked for the assignment because of nepotism rather than expertise. Libby's role in the apparent outing of Plame, and his testimony about it during prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation, are behind his trial for perjury and obstruction of justice.

What has gotten less notice is Libby's grand jury testimony that Cheney instructed him to leak parts of a secret 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to rebut Wilson's claims. By Libby's account, even the declassification was done in secret, with only the president and vice president knowing about it--even as other aides argued for releasing it. And once Bush and Cheney recognized the value of this particular disclosure, it took no time at all for them to authorize it.


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