Friday, April 07, 2006

Much ado about democracy.

President Bush claimed that the media was just a filter and I cannot agree [with] him more, especially when it comes to events just now coming to light. Sometimes I think that the filter is all in my head, but it is better than the president thinking the law is all in his hands. A careful look at his words and we see that at times there may be a calculated absence* of a lie as well as a careful navigation around the truth.

Much ado about nothing? It is only about the rule of law, the concept of checks and balances, the conspiracy of the messenger, the cherry-picking of intelligence and the preemptive war on democracy.

[* comment inserted after footnote]
I cannot help but feel that there should be a bigger distinction between leaking intelligence and declassifying them, and I have long asked, not what did the president know and when did he know it, but when did he decide what he did not want us to know? This leaves aside the issue of other lies, and whether outing an intelligence source was part of the authorization, whether anything was documented as authorized, and whether Republicans and some Democrats have the stomach for a government of laws with checks and balances. It also leaves aside a lot that he was up front about and the poor filters we have.

"There is an institutional interest and ultimately a public interest in having these decisions documented," said Ronald D. Lee, a Washington lawyer and former general counsel to the super-secret National Security Agency. "You can't have a government where everything is sort of done in people's heads."

* I hope to run across the specific words again, that were not a lie, but it was only because leaks were legal in his mind that he could be weaving what seems the truth. And I must add that I came across the quote above after making my comments, but having noted that the first link was very uncritical and hence must be what Bush called an "objective filter" or a co-conspirator in preempting intelligence or stalling the messenger of preemption.

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