To the great credit of the editorial board of the Washington Post, its Sunday editorial on Bush's declassification of some intelligence material is right on target.

    PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do.

    Rather than follow the usual declassification procedures and then invite reporters to a briefing -- as the White House eventually did -- Vice President Cheney initially chose to be secretive, ordering his chief of staff at the time, I. Lewis Libby, to leak the information to a favorite New York Times reporter. The full public disclosure followed 10 days later. There was nothing illegal or even particularly unusual about that; nor is this presidentially authorized leak necessarily comparable to other, unauthorized disclosures that the president believes, rightly or wrongly, compromise national security.

    After more than 2 1/2 years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald has reported no evidence to support Mr. Wilson's charge [that his wife was "outed"]. In last week's court filings, he stated that Mr. Bush did not authorize the leak of Ms. Plame's identity.

    (NOTE: read that again, MEM, Ray, etc. Keep reading it until it sinks in. The Washington Post, a premier member of the "mainstream media," the newspaper that reported Watergate and brought down Nixon, is telling you that you are WRONG)

    Mr. Libby's motive in allegedly disclosing her name to reporters, Mr. Fitzgerald said, was to disprove yet another false assertion, that Mr. Wilson had been dispatched to Niger by Mr. Cheney. In fact Mr. Wilson was recommended for the trip by his wife. Mr. Libby is charged with perjury, for having lied about his discussions with two reporters. Yet neither the columnist who published Ms. Plame's name, Robert D. Novak, nor Mr. Novak's two sources have been charged with any wrongdoing.

    As Mr. Fitzgerald pointed out at the time of Mr. Libby's indictment last fall, none of this is particularly relevant to the question of whether the grounds for war in Iraq were sound or bogus. It's unfortunate that those who seek to prove the latter would now claim that Mr. Bush did something wrong by releasing for public review some of the intelligence he used in making his most momentous decision.



What's really bizarre, though, is that Patrick Fitzgerald is going so far afield in an increasingly odd attempt to save his unraveling case against Libby.

Frankly, when he first laid out the case, I was impressed by Fitzgerald, but subsequent behavior and revelations have made me think he's just lost his mind, or at least all reasonable perspective.

If anybody still believes that Scooter Libby knowingly and deliberately and maliciously lied to Fitzgerald, rather than merely having gotten confused, that somebody has some 'splainin to do, because I and most other people I talk to just don't see it -- and again, I was inclined to believe Fitzgerald at first, even though it never made sense to me for Libby to have lied in the first place.