April 11, 2006: Selective Declassification, Wilson Smear Part of Same White House Effort to Manage Perception of War, Former Government Official Says

A former senior government official says that President Bush’s selective declassification of portions of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE—see October 1, 2002) for political purposes (see April 5, 2006), as testified to by Lewis Libby (see March 5, 2004 and March 24, 2004), was a misuse of the classification process for political reasons. Bush and his top officials released certain sections of the NIE to journalists (see 8:30 a.m. July 8, 2003) in an attempt to bolster their arguments in favor of invading Iraq, yet concealed other sections that showed how they misrepresented intelligence to suit their arguments. The former senior official says that the selective declassification was intertwined with the attempts to besmirch the reputation of war critic Joseph Wilson: “It was part and parcel of the same effort, but people don’t see it in that context yet.” The identify of the official is unstated. [National Journal, 4/6/2006] In 2007, Wilson’s wife, current senior CIA case officer Valerie Plame Wilson, will write that she experiences “a rush of relief” upon reading a New York Times story that reveals the “selective declassification” and the Times’s conclusion that “[i]t is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to punish Wilson” (see April 5, 2006). [Wilson, 2007, pp. 244]