I posted a comment linking to the project I am working on. Hopefully he adds it to the main post.

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So, if I am hearing Scottie McMuffin right, it would have been perfectly cool for, say, Harry S Truman,to spontaneously declassify the Manhattan project and its intended use because “there are a lot of misconceptions out there that we don’t have the will or the way to win this war with the Japanese.”

And if Lincoln decided to let the media know about Grant’s batttleplan? Probably a bad idea, but no real consequences. “The public needed to know that we have smart generals after all,” he might have said, according to Scottie.

His arguable rights and his inarguable responsibilities ought not to be confused here. It is grossly irresponsible, if not illegal, to ignore all processes in place, mislead the public about what you have done and then have the audacity to claim heaven’s side of the argument. He thinks can leak or take a leak right in front of us without anybody noticing how it all stinks. He is, again, wrong.

By July 18, when the sanitized NIE doc is “outted,” The WH had already conceded that the 16 words about Niger yellowcake should not have been in the State of the Union. CIA’s Tenet, in a statement mostly crafted in the WH, had already taken the fall for not getting these 16 words out of that speech (though it’s never been explained why, having succeeded in removing these words in another speech in Ohio the year before, Tenet should be held responsible for not reminding the WH what it had already told them once before.) The point is, by mid July, there was no dispute that the claim that Iraq tried to purchasehe Niger uranimum prucahse was not supported by reliable intelligence.
What was at stake, as Libby was spinning Judy Miller, Rove was spinning Time, and Condi was pointing reports to find the office at the CIA where Plame worked, was whether the President and Vice President knew that the facts were wrong when they made this Niger claim and the claim about aluminum tubes. Murray Waas’ early article this week exlains that the purpose of the Libby/Rove spinning was to prevent the public from concluding that WH knew it was lying/misleading and/or selectively cherry-picking pro-war intelligence and suppressing intelligence that undermined the case for war.
Libby’s efforts were part of a coverup to conceal the larger coverup about what false information the President and VP knew and when they knew it was false (but kept using it in speeches).

The trad press still hasn’t got this story right. They’re still focusing on the fact that the pre-war intelligence was wrong. But the whole point is that the WH knew it was wrong.
The authorized “leaks” of selective NIE information, and the continued classification and concealment of counter information, were intended to hide this coverup, not to contradict the Wilson claim about uranium.
Wilson was a threat because he was implying a coverup, directly by Cheney, indirectly by Bush; he wasn’t just challenging the veracity of the intelligence.

And everytime anyone gets close to saying, “the President and Vice President knowingly, deliberately lied,” then and only then does Scotty drop the “we won’t comment on an ongoing investigation” and fight back with Fitz’ transripts and any other diversion they can find.

Or, we can start judging men of all colors by their hair, and I don’t think most of them will like it.