Washington Post: The Leak was good

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Wash Post: Nothing Wrong with Bush 'Leak'

The Washington Post has broken ranks with the rest of the press over the media fiction that President Bush's recently revealed decision to authorize Lewis "Scooter" Libby to leak prewar Iraq intelligence somehow constitutes a new scandal.

In a stunning editorial headlined "The Good Leak," the Post said Sunday:

"There was nothing illegal or even particularly unusual about [Bush's decision]; nor is this presidentially authorized leak necessarily comparable to other, unauthorized disclosures that the president believes, rightly or wrongly, compromise national security."

Instead, the paper says that, if anyone has behaved unethically in the entire Leakgate fiasco, its Bush's accuser, former Iraq ambassador Joe Wilson:

"Mr. Wilson originally claimed in a 2003 New York Times op-ed and in conversations with numerous reporters that he had debunked a report that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Niger and that Mr. Bush's subsequent inclusion of that allegation in his State of the Union address showed that he had deliberately 'twisted' intelligence 'to exaggerate the Iraq threat.'"

But as the Post notes: "The material that Mr. Bush ordered declassified established, as have several subsequent investigations, that Mr. Wilson was the one guilty of twisting the truth. In fact, his report supported the conclusion that Iraq had sought uranium."

The Post says that Leakgate prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has provided additional evidence of the Bush accuser's duplicity.

"Mr. Wilson subsequently claimed that the White House set out to punish him for his supposed whistle-blowing by deliberately blowing the cover of his wife, Valerie Plame, who he said was an undercover CIA operative . . . [But] after more than 2 1/2 years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald has reported no evidence to support Mr. Wilson's charge."

Predictably, the Post's dismissal of the latest Leakgate "bombshell" didn't rate a single mention on the Sunday chat shows, which instead continued to cover the development as earth-shattering news.