Police Chief Authorized Arrests

Cliff May wrote a good post at the Corner today dissecting the news yesterday about the President’s authorization of Cheney and Libby to release portions of the 2002 NIE:

Again, as established, it’s in the job description of the President to decide what will remain classified (secret) and what will be de-classified and released to the press and public.

But it also should be noted that whatever “secrets” Libby revealed to NY Times reporter Judy Miller were not considered by Miller to be newsworthy enough even to write a story about.
Why not? Suppose for example, that Libby “revealed” the section of the 2002 NIE saying that most agencies of the intelligence community judged that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.

He would be releasing what had been a “secret” – a problem if he made that decision on his own; not a problem if he was authorized to do so by the POTUS or VPOTUS.

Why would Judy not have considered that worth a story? Because everyone following this issue already knew that. All Libby would have been adding is the fact that most domestic intelligence agencies concurred.

An important point frequently misrepresented in this debate: Those intelligence analysts that did not concur did not quite disagree either. That is, they were not saying, “No! Saddam has destroyed his WMD and has not been reconstituting his nuclear programs! We know that! We have proof!” Rather, they believed there was insufficient hard data on which to base a firm conclusion either way. And they were correct. Because the CIA had no good human intelligence (why that came about is another issue), analyses were based on speculation and conjecture. Unfortunately, policy makers often have to make consequential decisions based on such sketchy information.

I wish the critics could get that last point through their thick heads; decisions made about Iraq were not made with 100% surety and never could be. It doesn’t exist in the world of intelligence analysis.

I can’t recall how many hundreds of times I’ve heard a derivative of the argument he mentioned and try hard as you might, it’s difficult--near impossible—to convince someone that the fact that there was disagreement among intelligence analysts and their competing agencies simply means there was disagreement.

Frankly, they’d be better off attacking the inertia that dragged the Conventional Wisdom about Hussein’s programs through the decision making process.