He hates leaks, but Bush authorized one: documents

CBC News
Apr. 07, 2006

U.S. President George Bush, who has denounced government leaks, authorized a White House official to leak U.S. intelligence about Iraqi weapons while he sought to persuade the world to support an invasion, court documents suggest.

The documents surfaced Thursday in the perjury case against Lewis (Scooter) Libby, former chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Libby is accused of lying to the FBI about a leak in which a columnist was told that a woman whose husband criticized Bush's war plan was a CIA operative. It can be a crime under U.S. law to reveal the identity of an intelligence agent, although Libby is not charged with that offence.

The documents, filed by prosecutors in that case, say Libby told a grand jury that Bush and Cheney cleared him to leak information during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Reporting from Washington, CBC News reporter Henry Champ summarizes Libby's testimony as follows:

"He says that he was told directly by Cheney that the president has authorized this, that the information was sensitive, yes, but not classified and not secret and so therefore it wasn't a crime."

This reasoning comes out of "an administration that has always said there'll be no leakers here," Champ says. "'If anybody leaks, the president has often said, 'I'll fire them.'"

At the time, Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were pushing the idea that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, meaning weapons of nuclear, chemical or germ warfare. No such weapons have been found.

The CIA operative, Valerie Plame, was outed by a right-leaning newspaper columnist, Robert Novak, soon after her husband, a former diplomat, took a public stand against the claim that Saddam had been trying to buy uranium in the West African republic of Niger.

The new documents say nothing about Libby's role in leaking Plame's identity, although he is accused of passing the information to at least one reporter.