Pat Roberts Frays Too

* soto:

"So, is the White House now arguing that our national security wasn’t compromised by Bush’s authorization for Libby to leak the relevant then-classified portions of the October 2002 NIE? If so, then Stephen Hadley’s summary in the summer of 2003 of when Bush knew the WMD claims were suspect similarly cannot be hidden behind a national security firewall any longer, can it, since release of the source document (the NIE) does not compromise national security?"

this is the summary that Waas pointed to which said that the aluminium tubes stuff was bunk, and Bush read.

* nyt ed:

"For more than two years, Senate Republicans have dragged out an investigation into how the Bush administration came to use bogus intelligence on Iraq to justify a war. A year ago, Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it "a monumental waste of time" to consider whether the White House manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
[]
Obviously, this is not a waste of time, monumental or otherwise. It is vital that the Senate keep its word and publish a thorough accounting of how the intelligence on Iraq was presented to the world."

* pincus et al:

"Libby, he wrote, was essentially dispatched to rebut this attack the following week. According to Fitzgerald's account, Libby considered this task unusual and initially protested "because of the classified nature of the NIE." But Cheney -- at some later date, not specified in the court filing -- "advised him that the President had authorized" disclosures from that document.

Libby also testified that the vice president's legal counsel, David S. Addington, "opined that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to declassification of the document." The date that Addington offered this advice to Libby is not specified in Fitzgerald's account."