There he goes again. The Leaker in Chief shooting his mouth off and compromising a national security asset inorder to win domestic political advantage. Remember when U.S. military forces whacked the terrorist Zarqawi? Well, the President, eager to burnish his image with the American people, rushed to the microphones where he spilled Top Secret beans by identifying the head of the top secret terrorist unit at Fort Bragg. According to a recent article in Newsweek:
No one would have mentioned his name at all if President George W. Bush hadn’t singled him out in public. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, West Point ’76, is not someone the Army likes to talk about. He isn’t even listed in the directory at Fort Bragg, N.C., his home base. That’s not because McChrystal has done anything wrong—quite the contrary, he’s one of the Army’s rising stars—but because he runs the most secretive force in the U.S. military. That is the Joint Special Operations Command, the snake-eating, slit-their-throats “black ops” guys who captured Saddam Hussein and targeted Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. . . .
After the Zarqawi strike, multinational forces spokesman Gen. Bill Caldwell refused to comment on JSOC’s role, saying, “We don’t talk about when special operating forces are involved.” But when Bush revealed to reporters that it was McChrystal’s Special Ops teams that had found Zarqawi, Caldwell had to gulp and say (to laughter), “If the president of the United States said it was, then I’m sure it was.”
Way to go George. And we’re suppose to take you seriously when you cry about leaks? Because you live in a big glass house I suggest you think twice before tossing any more rocks at the New York Times.
There is a misunderstanding at the base of this post. Willfully rational people continue to apply obsolete universal logic and standards to the newly defined office of the executive. George is the commander, the decider, the state. There is no this, therefore that. There is no assurance that what he says today is true tomorrow. There is never a gotcha of any practical use. If George declassifies something, it is declassified for so long as he feels it should be, maybe only as long as it takes him to speak of it. Lesser persons like Plame, Libby and McChrystal may be tripped up and knocked down, and even lesser persons may be obliterated by the sudden changes to what is. Those subject to the executive, like General Caldwell, can only smile and say, “It’s a good thing.”
Seriously, the executive’s arbitrary, self serving choices of what is important is just one more little proof that the GWOT is a big, heavy, costly crock of shit.