Can anyone speak to the points brought up about the NIE and the July 8th and 18th dates?

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

I think I get it, but I doubt I could explain it coherently to someone else.

I think they said that the NIE was classified on July 8th but someone shared parts of it with Judith Miller. It was "officially" declassified on July 18th. This seemed to say that the President could classify and declassify at will - which I guess gives them cover for leaking part of it if the President said it was ok. But yet,did it remained officially classified in that period from the 8th to the 18th?

Now, I also seem to remember reading somewhere that there was one thing that NO ONE could declassify - and that one thing was a covert agent's identity. Is that true?

[AndyA]

1. It's my understanding that the declassification of a covert agent is a process,

that must be completed before they are no longer classified. It's confusing.

I don't believe that any one person can just say, "This person is no longer classified," sign a statement of such, and that's it. But I could be wrong.

[TheBaldyMan]

4. When 'this person is no longer classified' puts a people at risk it's criminal.

damn it, it's treasonous.

[librechik]

2. it was reitierated during the hearing that the Prez has absolute power to declassify

or classify "on the run," as it were. This was accomplished with an executive order penned by Bush himself back in 2003 http://www.fas.org/sgp/bush/eoamend.html which also apparently gave the power to classify things "on the run" to the VP. However, the power to declassify is NOT part of the VP powers, even though he has claimed it is. And if you read the order, nobody followed protocol on Plame anyway. The NIE was only "declassified" when it was discovered that it had been leaked by someone in the WH (Bush himself!) too early and they had to quickly CYA. Since it was only declassified in the President's head, they had to later go back and create paper trails for the act of declassifying after the fact.

[TheBaldyMan]

3. not leaked by Bush WH = bad, leaked by Bush WH = good.

That might seem over simplistic but that's the gist of it.

Zaid claims that the President has absolute authority to classify and de-classify. This is debateable.

If you declassify something and it is out in the public domain you can hardly classify it after it becomes public knowlege. It would be absurd to claim that you could get the genie back in the bottle once information is out there.

On the other hand if you have information whose provenance is not wide then you could classify it to keep it as secret, apart from those who already know and presumably, at some time in the future, those with a need to know.

There may be an argument of damage limitation where something has been leaked, for instance, contents of a confidential document, in full or part, have inadvertently fallen into the wrong hands. If the material or data is recovered in a timely fashion you might be able to keep it secret.

If a document was de-classified then was found to have been inappropriately de-classified because it still contains information that remained sensitive, this would be a breach of security. How severe the breach was would depend on the nature of the data.

I'm sorry if this is over-long, I think the title sums it up better.