Don't ask, don't know

[Emillereid]

10/18/2003



AT A TIME when President Bush ought to be doing everything he can to show that he is an engaged commander in chief, he is acting as though there is nothing he can or should do to discover and punish the officials who leaked to columnist Robert Novak the identity of the CIA's Valerie Plame Wilson. Bush's passivity in response to a political dirty trick that harms US intelligence operations and demoralizes intelligence officers is an abdication of responsibility.
Bush has left the work of locating the leakers to the Justice Department and the FBI, while he plays the role of a detached observer. This stance makes him look like a weak leader presiding over a band of unruly subordinates who feud with each other, betraying patriotic Americans like Ms. Wilson, with no fear of being brought to hand by the president.

If he wished to do so, Bush could summon the likely suspects from the vice president's office, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council to the Oval Office and tell them that, as their president, he is ordering the officials who gave away Valerie Plame's cover to confess their role and resign.

What the leakers did was not a merely technical violation of the law. By revealing her identity, the dirty tricksters in the administration sacrificed all the informants and sources who had ever, wittingly or unwittingly, given Wilson intelligence information. Perhaps even more destructive was the leakers' apparent attempt to show the CIA there is a price to pay for refusing to tailor the agency's analyses to the wishes of policy makers....

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2003/10/18/dont_ask_dont_know/

Good article on Bush's disinterest and lack of optimism (obstructionism) in finding leakers of CIA operative.