The Right State

The Democratic politicians are at it again, continuing their assault on the President concerning the release of the ‘classified’ information before the war with Iraq. This is much ado about nothing as the Dems’ gamesmanship is putting the lives of our fighting men and women at risk. The Democrats and their willing partners in crime, the MSM, are so desperate for some sort of scandal that will stick to this administration that they are willing try anything. And now, many of the Republican members of Congress instead of supporting their President when they know he is right are sticking their political fingers into the wind and looking at the President’s poll numbers before taking a non-stance. One of those is the left leaning Senator from Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter. I am so sick of Specter not having the guts to take a stand with the President concerning the CIA leaks. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, he already knows the President may declassify information for release to the public any time he wishes. But that is not how Specter sees it according to Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should speak publicly about their involvement in the CIA leak case so people can understand what happened, a leading Republican senator said Sunday.

“We ought to get to the bottom of it so it can be evaluated, again, by the American people,” said Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“The president may be entirely in the clear, and it may turn out that he had the authority to make the disclosures which were made,” Specter said. But, he added, “it was not the right way to go about it because we ought not to have leaks in government.”

If President Bush released the information, IT WAS NOT A LEAK. Leaking involves the intentional release of classified material. The documents released were not classified. Now, many Democrats are bolstered the President’s seemingly low poll numbers and by those Republicans who are abandoning the President in his time of need. Emboldened by the likes of Arlen Specter and the other spineless Republicans who are ditching the President, and with the complicity of the MSM, the Dems are in an all-out blitz. John Kerry, one of the cut-and-run Senators from Massachusetts, continued his nonstop assault of George Bush.

Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who ran against Bush for president in 2004, said it was wrong for Bush to declassify information selectively “in order to buttress phony arguments to go to war ” and to attack people politically.

“This was not a declassification in order to really educate America. This was a declassification in order to mislead America,” Kerry said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “I think it’s a disgrace.”

It is fairly obvious that John Kerry is trying to line up his supporter on the hard-left in order to win the Democratic nomination for President in the 2008 election. The three time Purple Heart awarded for scratches former presidential nominee and Senator is once again abandoning the troops in a time of war. The last time was in April 1971 when he testified before Congress as a former member of the United States military and as a member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Kerry’s actions contributed to the deaths of many American soldiers as the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Viet Cong were led to believe that if they held on, we would withdraw. And now, John Kerry and other members of the Democratic left are helping the enemies of America again. The terrorist believe if they can just hold on, the left will make the United States pull out.

By portraying the President Bush as having misled the American people, as a criminal for releasing the NIE is wrong. There are several problems with this line of thinking. First and foremost is the fact that the President may de-classify information any time he wishes. One of those who believe this is former judge and Fox judicial analyst, Andrew Napolitano. The left leaning News Hounds actually has a good take on what the Judge said.

Napolitano (JAN) explained that there are two categories of classified information, that which the Congress has made classified and which Congress has made it a crime to reveal, and that which the present president or any of his predecessors has classified. In the second case, the president can declassify what (s)he or his/her predecessors has classified, or delegate to the vice-president or a group of advisors to declassify same, but none of them can declassify what Congress has classified.

It is not worded very clearly, but what the Judge is saying is that there are two types of classified information: one classified by Congress, and one classified by the President. The President may declassify any information classified by himself or any of his predecessors, or he may delegate the job of declassifying to the V.P. or any of his advisors. But he may not declassify anything classified by Congress. Since the NIE is done by the executive branch, it falls under the President’s purview.

In this case, the President was under attack by liars like Joe Wilson who filed one report to Congress and then wrote an attack piece in the New York Times falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein was not trying to buy yellow cake uranium from Niger. With Wilson’s op-ed piece out, the rest of the Dems fell into line accusing Bush of lying. With all the clattering coming from the cut-and-run Democrats, George Bush felt he needed to buttress his claims for attacking Iraq with facts. John Podhoretz in the New York Post Online has more.

On Oct. 7, 2002, nine months before Bush’s supposed “leak,” the administration released an unclassified version of the very same NIE at the urging of Senate Democrats. And in early 2003, reporters hostile to the administration (primarily John Judis and Spencer Ackerman of The New Republic) were being told all sorts of things about the still-classified portions of the NIE.

And this “leak” wasn’t a leak in any case. A “leak” is the unauthorized release of government information. The leak of classified information is a crime. But according to Scooter Libby, the former chief of staff to the vice president who gave the information from the NIE to a reporter, he only released it because he was authorized to do so by the president himself.

Constitutionally, the authority to declare documents “classified” resides with the president. So, under the terms of an executive order first drafted in 1982, he can declassify a document merely by declaring it unclassified.

The language of the executive order reads as follows: “Information shall be declassified or downgraded by the official who authorized the original classification, if that official is still serving in the same position . . . [or] a supervisory official.” In the executive branch, the president is the ultimate “supervisory official.”

The knowledge that the President has the authority to declassify information has never stopped the lies of the Dems before and I do not think it will stop them now. The behavior of the Democrats shows just how far they are will to go to regain power. They are sacrificing the long term security of this nation to secure a majority in Congress. As the Democrats did during Vietnam, they are even willing to once again, sacrifice the lives of our soldiers by emboldening our enemies for political gain. They will stop at nothing to gain power. The example of Joe Wilson should be a wake-up call to any Republicans thinking about dumping the President during a time of war and when our soldiers need us the most. John Podhoretz continues with his analysis.

But Wilson had claimed that he had inside knowledge that the White House knew Saddam had never sought to purchase uranium and that it went ahead and told a cock-and-bull story anyway - that, in other words, Bush had deliberately lied us into war.

That charge was so explosive that the Bush administration had no choice but to answer it in some fashion. By authorizing the release of some classified material to a reporter, Bush was fighting back against a slander.

And slander it was, no more and no less. The Senate Intelligence Committee specifically said Wilson came back from Niger and offered up some information suggesting Saddam had been pursuing nuclear material in Niger in 1999.

Wilson’s appalling lies were revealed in 2004. And yet, here we are, in 2006, fighting the same old battles. Guess this is what happens when you don’t win a war quickly enough.

Will the knowledge of the President’s power to declassify documents be enough to quiet the Democrats? Nope. They did not learn even when the issue of national security cost them the Presidency in 2004 and seats in Congress in 2002 and 2004. Now it needs to be understood that not all Democrats soft on terrorism. Joe Lieberman is such an excellent example and there are others. America MUST win the GWOT. Putting short term political advantage ahead of our national security is a disaster waiting to happen. Hinging their collective political futures on George Bush is a sure sign of failure on both sides of the isle. America needs its leaders to move past political posturing and move on to securing this country. America is at war. Its time our politicians realized this fact and quit riding the fence for the benefit of the United States.

Tags: Politics //