Government by Extortion

Even worse than imagined, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney use classified information about vital national security matters for naked political purposes—often character assassination—and when they do so, they feel free to lie about it. That is the unavoidable conclusion .Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" -- using classified information -- to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq. Repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Moreover, these dishonest and dishonorable liars take these nefarious actions of policies that, inevitably, prove disastrous, owing to their incompetence. And when, on those rare occasions, reporters are willing and able to address the truth of their actions, they can find their loyalty and patriotism under attack and have even been faced with criminal investigations over the reporting of exactly the same sort of leaks Bush, Cheney and company feel free to employ—except that these sometimes turn out to be true. And yet, somehow, the men and women who run our media establishment, think none of this is as bad as Bill Clinton fooling around with an intern. Even worse, they continue to report the things they say stenographically, rather than employing the skepticism they have so richly earned, over and over, and over. Even more terrifying, these very same dishonest incompetents are planning another war even as the world continues to pay the price for their dangerous and irresponsible failure in the current one.

Former Federal Prosecutor Elizabeth De la Vega recently considered the latest news in the Plame/Libby Leak case and, in a brilliant analysis of this Toad's Wild Ride of an inside-the-Beltway Imax 3-D extravaganza in which, it looks increasingly apparent, Bush and Co. have lost their way, she suggests why the typical media questions of the moment -- "Is what the President did legal?" or "Does the President have authority to declassify information at will?" -- aren't the right ones to ask. The real one to ask, she suggests after reviewing the history of the case in detail is: Is a President, on the eve of his reelection campaign, legally entitled to ward off political embarrassment and conceal past failures in the exercise of his office by unilaterally and informally declassifying selected -- as well as false and misleading -- portions of a classified National Intelligence Estimate that he has previously refused to declassify, in order to cause such information to be secretly disclosed under false pretenses in the name of a "former Hill staffer" to a single reporter, intending that reporter to publish such false and misleading information in the national press?