Friday, February 17, 2006
Editorial: The White House's maestro of secrets
Vice President Cheney claims far more power over classified information than the president and the law likely grant.
From the RoundTable blog
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The most surprising thing Vice President Dick Cheney said during his Wednesday interview with Fox News was not that he had drunk a beer before shooting a hunting companion but that he has broad authority to declassify secrets.
The issue came up because Cheney's former aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is under indictment on charges of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about disclosing the identity of an undercover CIA officer, alleges that his superiors authorized him to do so.
Whether Cheney is one of the unnamed superiors remains unknown. What is known is that a vice president who draws a cloak of shadows around everything he does now asserts unprecedented authority over the flow of information -- authority it is not clear he has, according to secrecy experts.
President Bush, in a 2003 executive order facilitating government secrecy, radically expanded the vice president's power to classify documents, elevating it to nearly the same as the president's own. Before that, the vice president's authority was the same as any other agency head's.
But classification is not the same as declassification. Typically, only the president or the head of the agency that originally classified something may declassify it. Bush's executive order did not expressly extend that authority to the vice president.
Even if it did, according to Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, Libby's supervisors might have broken other secrecy laws.
"Some categories of classified information are protected by statute and not only by executive order," Aftergood said. "Intelligence sources and methods are protected by the National Security Act and cannot be declassified even by the say-so of the president."
Those would be intelligence sources and methods like the contents of a National Intelligence Estimate at the heart of the Libby investigation.
Moreover, no one, not even the president, can declassify something for just one person.
"There are established procedures for performing declassification, and they include such things as marking the document as declassified, identifying the name of the declassifier and notifying the holders of the information that it has been declassified," Aftergood said. "It's not something that is done casually on the fly."
Where, then, are those signed documents? Either Libby is lying, the White House is hiding something, or procedures were not followed.
This debacle and Cheney's ensuing power grab expose an administration infected with a dangerously cavalier attitude toward secrecy and the truth, which undermines democracy.
