Links follow to weekend coverage in the New York Times and Washington Post of the revelations that Lewis "Scooter"
Libby has claimed that he had the approval of President George W. Bush to leak classified information to NYT reporter
Judith Miller.
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By David E. Sanger and David Barstow
The New York Times
Sunday 09 April 2006
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Washington - President Bush's apparent order authorizing a senior White House official to reveal to a reporter
previously classified intelligence about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain uranium came as the information was already
being discredited by several other officials in the administration, interviews and documents from the time show.
A review of the records and interviews conducted during and after the crucial period in June and July of 2003 also show
that what the aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., said he was authorized to portray as a "key judgment" by intelligence officers
had in fact been given much less prominence in the most important assessment of Iraq's weapons capability.
Mr. Libby said he drew on that report, the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, when he spoke with the
reporter. However, the conclusions about Mr. Hussein's search for uranium appear to have been buried deeper in the
report in part because of doubts about their reliability.
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By David Stout
The New York Times
Friday 07 April 2006
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Washington - The White House tried today to quell the furor over the leaking of sensitive pre-war intelligence on Iraq,
as President Bush's spokesman insisted that the president had the authority to declassify and release information "in
the public interest" and had never done so for political reasons.
The spokesman, Scott McClellan, said a decision was made to declassify and release some information to rebut
"irresponsible and unfounded accusations" that the administration had manipulated or misused pre-war intelligence to
buttress its case for war.
"That was flat-out false," Mr. McClellan said.
Mr. McClellan was barraged at a news briefing by questions over assertions by I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of
staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, that President Bush authorized him, through Mr. Cheney, in July 2003 to disclose
key parts of what was until then a classified pre-war evaluation, or National Intelligence Estimate, on Iraq.
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By Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer
The Washington Post
Sunday 09 April 2006
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Prosecutor describes Cheney, Libby as key voices pitching Iraq-Niger story.
As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney's former top aide, 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.
Bluntly and repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Citing grand jury testimony from the
vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald fingered Cheney as the first to voice a
line of attack that at least three White House officials would soon deploy against former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson
IV.
Cheney, in a conversation with Libby in early July 2003, was said to describe Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger the
previous year - in which the envoy found no support for charges that Iraq tried to buy uranium there - as "a junket set
up by Mr. Wilson's wife," CIA case officer Valerie Plame.
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Leak-Hating President as Leaker-in-Chief?
By Tom Raum
The Associated Press
Saturday 08 April 2006
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Washington - President Bush insists a president "better mean what he says." Those words could return to haunt him.
After long denouncing leaks of all kinds, Bush is confronted with a statement - unchallenged by his aides - that he
authorized a leak of classified material to undermine an Iraq war critic.
The allegation in the CIA leak case threatens the credibility of a president already falling in the polls, and it gives
Democrats fresh material to accuse him of hypocrisy.
"In politics, what gets bad gets worse," said GOP strategist Ed Rogers. "And we've been on a bad roll for quite some
time. We're in an environment now where every mistake is a metaphor."
Critics were quick to portray the Bush-leak report as a fresh sign of a failed Iraq policy, manipulated intelligence
and a lack of presidential veracity. Honesty was once seen by Americans as one of Bush's strongest character traits, but
polls show that perception has waned in Bush's second term.
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