White House defends CIA data leak

Democrats, meanwhile, stepped up their criticism, saying the selective leak proved their long-held belief that Bush had cherry-picked intelligence to justify the war. Some renewed calls for a congressional investigation into whether the president knowingly misled the public about Iraq's capability to use weapons of mass destruction.

In court papers filed earlier this week, I. Lewis ''Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was quoted as saying that Bush gave him approval in early July 2003 to leak key findings from a classified CIA report called the National Intelligence Estimate. The report said Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking nuclear weapons.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan, whose office had refused to comment on the matter for a day, found himself at the center of the questions of whether Bush had followed accepted procedures in declassifying the report. At a July 18, 2003, press briefing -- at least 10 days after Bush had authorized the leak -- McClellan announced that the report was ''just, as of today, officially declassified."

Asked by reporters yesterday about the discrepancy, McClellan said he would ''have to go back and look at the specific comments, but I'm not changing anything that was said previously." He added that he believed he had been referring to when it was ''declassified for the public."

McClellan then sought to turn the tables on Democrats, saying the opposition party was wrong to equate Bush's approval of the leak with past instances of government officials releasing classified information that harms national security.

''Declassifying information and providing it to the public when it is in the public interest is one thing," McClellan said, ''but leaking classified information that could compromise our national security is something that is very serious. And there is a distinction. Now, there are Democrats out there that fail to recognize that distinction, or refuse to recognize that distinction. They are simply engaging in crass politics. Let's make clear what the distinction is."

McClellan said Bush still ''believes the leaking of classified information is a very serious matter."

But Democrats said Bush was violating his own admonition against leaking.

''For years, President Bush has denied knowing about conversations between his top aides and Washington reporters, conversations where his aides -- like Scooter Libby -- sought to justify the war in Iraq and discredit the White House's critics by leaking national security secrets," Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada said in a statement. ''He must tell the American people whether the Bush Oval Office is the place where the buck stops or the leaks start."

Some observers said Bush's authorization of the leak proves allegations that a group of top administration officials came up with a plan to leak only intelligence that buttressed their case for war, and not the expressions of doubt.

Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former counterterrorism chief, said in a telephone interview that there is ''no doubt in my mind that there was a governmentwide program of distributing on a selective basis intelligence information that supported the administration's policy point of view. It was the use of classified intelligence for political purposes."

The Libby case stemmed from administration efforts to discredit a former US ambassador to Iraq, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had written in a New York Times op-ed on July 6, 2003, that Bush's assertion that Iraq had obtained nuclear material from Africa was baseless.

In an effort to undermine Wilson's assertion, Bush within two days authorized the release of the Iraq intelligence information to Judith Miller, who then was a reporter for The New York Times. Libby met with Miller on July 8, 2003, and discussed the information, but the court papers provide no indication that he told Miller about footnotes in the report in which the State Department said it was ''highly dubious" about the contention that Iraq obtained nuclear material from Niger.

At around the same time, Libby and other White House officials were discussing with reporters the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, as a CIA official -- information that was disclosed in a Robert Novak column on July 14, 2003.

Four days later, with questions swirling about whether prewar intelligence justified the decision to invade Iraq, the White House released the National Intelligence Estimate, including the doubts raised by the State Department.

''We always want to share facts with the American people," McClellan said on that day, explaining the release of the report. ''And this information was just, as of today, officially declassified, and it was an opportunity to share with them some information that showed the clear and compelling case that we had for confronting the threat that Saddam Hussein posed."

Many of the stories published after the report's release focused on State Department doubts about the intelligence, and thus the release may have accomplished the opposite of what Bush hoped to achieve earlier by allowing a selective leak of information in it to a New York Times reporter. Despite the leak, Miller did not write a story in the 10 days between when she received the information from Libby and the material was made public. She had earlier written stories that the administration cited as buttressing the case for war.

Libby has been indicted on charges of lying to investigators about his conversations with reporters about the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson. He is not charged with leaking classified information, but those leaks have become a central focus of the case. The court papers say Libby said he got ''approval from the President through the Vice President to discuss material that would be classified but for that approval." The papers do not say whether Bush personally authorized the leak of the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA official.

The court papers were filed by government prosecutors seeking to deny Libby's request for thousands of pages of documents related to the case.