It's not the declassification, its the motive and method.

I think it is pretty much indesputable that the president can declassify anything that was classified by an Executive Branch agency. He has supervisory authority over them all. But from my experience and everything I've read, the agency that classifies a document is normally the agency that DEclassifies a document. The reasoning behind this is fairly obvious if you think about it. That agency is the only one that is likely to know all the reasons (some not too obvious) why the info was classified to begin with and what the repercussions (and unintended consequences) might be.

The Bush Administration has not disputed that the President approved the declassifcation of selected portions of a National Intelligence Estimate to help rebut Ambassador Joseph Wilson's article debunking the myth that Saddam was actively trying to procure yellowcake uranium from Niger.

But...

According to the New York Times, while President Bush ordered the declassification of the selected portions of the NIE, he never specifically authorized Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney or anyone else to feed it to the media.

So, assuming this is true, this raises an interesting question... Why not declassify it the normal way? What am I missing? As I mentioned in the previous post, the Executive Order covering declassification says...

In some exceptional cases, however, the need to protect such information may be outweighed by the public interest in disclosure of the information, and in these cases the information should be declassified. When such questions arise, they shall be referred to the agency head or the senior agency official.

It doesn't say "in these cases the information should be declassified by having the Vice President's Chief of Staff reveal the information (mischaracterized as a "key judgement) to a sympathetic reporter for the New York Times with the proviso that it be attributed to a "former Hill staffer".

All this subterfuge makes one wonder if this so-caled de-facto declassification was motivated by the national interest or by a desire for political damage control. That's why I say it's not the declassification, it's the motive and method that needs to be justified.

According to CNN

President Bush said Monday that he had declassified intelligence documents in 2003 to help explain his administration's reasons for going to war in Iraq.

"I thought it was important for people to get a better sense of what I was saying in my speeches," Bush said, answering a question from an audience member at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. "And I felt I could do so without jeopardizing ongoing intelligence matters."

So again I ask... Why not declassify it the normal way? As Dan Froomkin of washingtonpost.com put it, these folks have got some explaining to do.

Elizabeth de la Vega has written the most concise summary of the President's leaking of classified info that I've found.

Is a President, on the eve of his reelection campaign, legally entitled to ward off political embarrassment and conceal past failures in the exercise of his office by unilaterally and informally declassifying selected -- as well as false and misleading -- portions of a classified National Intelligence Estimate that he has previously refused to declassify, in order to cause such information to be secretly disclosed under false pretenses in the name of a "former Hill staffer" to a single reporter, intending that reporter to publish such false and misleading information in a prominent national newspaper?