“Did the Bush administration “authorize” the leak of classified information to Bob Woodward? And did those leaks damage national security?,” asks the intrepid Murray Waas at his blog, Whatever Already!.


Well, if some of my friends’ hunches are correct, Bob is a member of the intelligence community, and has been for a long time. I can’t confirm that but, as Larry C. Johnson wrote for BoomanTribune, “There is an entire backstory on Woodward that most folks are ignoring. Woodward appears to have been in bed with neocon types going back to 1969.”


Waas continues:

The vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) made exactly that charge tonight in a letter to John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence. What prompted Rockefeller to write Negroponte was a recent op-ed in the New York Times by CIA director Porter Goss complaining that leaks of classified information were the fault of “misguided whistleblowers.”


Rockefeller charged in his letter that the most “damaging revelations of intelligence sources and methods are generated primarily by Executive Branch officials pushing a particular policy, and not by the rank-and-file employees of intelligence agencies.” …. Read all


Among Rockefeller’s charges (PDF): “In his 2002 book Bush at War, Bob Woodward described almost unfettered access to classified material of the most sensitive nature.” Rockefeller is clearly, deeply angry:

I wrote both former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet and Acting DCI John McLaughlin seeking to determine what steps were being taken to address the appalling disclosures contained in Bush at War. The only response I received was to indicate that the leaks had been authorized by the Administration. The CIA has still not responded to a follow-up letter I sent a year and half ago on September 1, 2004, trying to pin down which officials were authorized to meet with Mr. Woodward and by whom, and what intelligence information was conveyed during these authorized exchanges.


Do read all of Waas’s blog entry and Sen. Rockefeller’s letter.


One of my complaints about Sen. Rockfeller is that while his noblesse oblige is admirable, his style is too gentlemanly to deal with Bush’s vicious rogue state. Would that Sen. Rockefeller would set aside the pen, and pound the table on every news show on every channel!


And my overall complaint is that this is yet one more instance in which the White House thumbs its nose at the congressional branch. One under-discussed issue of the Port/Dubai brouhaha is that the White House is telling members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat, to butt out. It’s a pattern we here are all too familiar with.

Really, Sen. Rockefeller. Drop the pen and shout to the high heavens. Stand on the steps of the Senate and speak directly into the cameras to the American people. Tell them we are in peril from a presidency that is decimating our system of government.