Saturday, April 08, 2006

is declassification legal?

* Juliette Kayyem @ tpmcafe:
"In addition, Scooter Libby's grand jury testimony (in 2005) now illuminates Cheney's subsequent defense of his new authority in a rather odd televised interview with FOX's Brit Hume. This interview, in Feb. 2006, was supposed to be about Cheney's hunting accident. At the end, as noted in this piece, Cheney defends his new power to classify.

The addition of this aside conversation is telling, and I don't have any solid theories of why Cheney would be discussing it when the hunting accident was of primary concern. Did he know then that Scooter Libby had testified as such? If yes, who told him given that grand jury testimony is not supposed to be disclosed."
one interesting thing that this episode demonstrates is that when we notice something weird like that aside in the hume interview, we are right to call attention to it (and attempt to interpretit). that shit doesnt happen by accident.

many of us noticed at the time that Hume knew to ask this question - at the time i noted that hume couldnt even look at cheney when he asked the question:
"when hume asked it, he kinda looked at the floor, mumbling the way he does, till he rattled off the question, and then finally looked back at the veep to get the answer..."

2 comments:

lukery said...

hi eedub - of course cheney knew. i'm not sure what the writer was getting at when she said GJ testimony is sposed to be secret - scooter is allowed to tell whoever he wants what he said, right?

sooooo - bush/cheney/baker have known this all along - they seemed to fumble to response this past week though - fitz obviously really took them by surprise (even though they'd already trial-ballooned their little inoculation exercise on Hume.) It took them a couple of days to get the THIS ISNT ABOUT PLAME storyline out there - most people have conflated the NIE/PLame thing already.

the message machine appears to have broken.

lukery said...

btw - hope your trip is going well.

we miss you already (although it hardly seems like you have gone anywhere)