Cheney’s Power to Declassify Information
February 16th, 2006 @ 10:36 am
In his interview with Brit Hume on Fox News last night, Dick Cheney said that he had “the power under a presidential executive order” to declassify information. Cheney offered this information when asked by Hume about Scooter Libby and the recent court filing in which Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald revealed “Libby’s assertions to a grand jury that superiors had authorized him to spread sensitive information from a National Intelligence Estimate.”
“I’ve certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions,” he said, but he would not say whether he had done so unilaterally.
Cheney was referring to an executive order on classification of information first signed by President Bill Clinton in 1995. In March 2003, just days after ordering U.S. troops into Iraq, President Bush amended order to, among other things, give the vice president the same classification power as the president.
{snip}
“Cheney was referring to Executive Order 13292, issued by President Bush on March 25, 2003, which dealt with the handling of classified material. That order was not an entirely new document but was, instead, an amendment to an earlier Executive Order, number 12958, issued by President Bill Clinton on April 17, 1995.
{snip}
I’m no legal expert, but it does appear to me that Executive Order 13292 does have strict guidelines about revealing “the identity of a confidential human source.” If I am interpreting this Executive order correctly any declassified information would have gone through the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office. And under “Sec. 5.5. Sanctions. (a)” of Executive Order 13292, “If the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office finds that a violation of this order or its implementing directives has occurred, the Director shall make a report to the head of the agency or to the senior agency official so that corrective steps, if appropriate, may be taken.”
MORE & LINKS -
http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=1962