Wednesday, April 12, 2006

To Declassify, Or Not. . .

Ok, so Bush knew he was lying, but it was classified. Right? Right?
I've "bolded" an interesting point from the following:

Ezra Klein: What Did The President Know and When Did He Know It?: ". . , The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped 'secret' and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.

Unlike the portions of the National Intelligence Estimate which had to be declassified lest the American people be misled by devious opponents of the war, this report has not been declassified, distributed to ensure the public who is financing and fighting this war is able to conduct their deliberative democracy with the best available information. The administration declassifies to embarrass political opponents, not to better inform the citizenry they're supposed to serve.

Instead, Americans heard Colin Powell, months after the report's completion, assert that the government's 'confidence level' about the labs was increasing. That was probably correct, as more and more bureaucrats forgot about the shelved document, they became more amenable to their own spin. And so it's no surprise that, come September, America saw Dick Cheney declare the trailers 'mobile biological facilities' that could have been used for anthrax or smallpox
. . ."

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