(100% rugby digression – sorry all)

My playing days ended a long time ago.

My Dad, though, just finally stopped – he’s one of those really, really old boy boys.

James Bay was the club – Victoria BC, and there we didn’t have to stop between fall and spring (just played right through the rainy season).

Hey – here’s a weird thought – When he wasn’t busy punching opposing players at Yale wonder if Lancelot Link spent the rest of his time whining about the knock-on rule. After all, seems to me he’s been a working the knock-on pretty much his entire life (and that includes his Leaker-In-Chief shennanigans).

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I wrote about it here: http://backseatdriving.blogspo…..pends.html

As one commenter over at The American Prospect said today, “Using legitimate presidential powers (declassification) for illegitimate purposes (to make a political attack) is the very definition of abuse of power.

Hey, that was me. I said that here somewhere too, before I posted it over there. :)

Looking more carefully at the EOA, the term calling out the 180 days is actually in Sec. 6.3, the very last paragraph immediately before Bush’s signature (he can’t say he didn’t see this):

Sec. 6.3. Effective Date. This order is effective immediately, except for section 1.6, which shall become effective 180 days from the date of this order.

Maybe there’s something else buried in Sec. 1.6 besides the marking of materials as “declassified”…but the 180 days must be key, regardless of the issue being addressed in Sec. 1.6.

Reading more closely, Bush also wrote his own permission slip with this EOA, noting Sec. 6.1, (l)(3), which basically says he is authorized to declassify anything:

(l) “Declassification authority” means:

(1) the official who authorized the original classification, if that official is still serving in the same position;

(2) the originators current successor in function;

(3) a supervisory official of either; or

(4) officials delegated declassification authority in writing by the agency head or the senior agency official.

I’m wondering if there was anything from Tenet or other official that qualified Sec. 6.1 (l)(4); did someone indicate in an email or handwritten note that certain information “would be worth sharing”…?

Might explain why there is no denial from the White House; Bush wrote his own permission slip, and he “understood” the information to be available for declassification.

And they truly thought this would all go away inside (180) days, too…?

…what interests me is the idea that the president might have declassified something orally instead of issuing a written executive order……

Dear god. Well, I guess you have to parse it carefully, like everything else that comes out of these peoples’ faces. They want to share facts, but they’re just abysmally, tragically bad at it. Right from their desperate desire to share the minutes of Cheney’s energy policy meetings right down to the present. God how they wanted to share all that stuff with us. Who knew that fighting tooth and nail through the federal courtts to avoid having to disclose it would result in the utterly unexpected outcome of it ending up not getting disclosed? Baffling. And that’s just one example of the myriad instances where they did everything they could to hide information and then, damned if the dratted stuff never got public no matter how much they wanted it to. It’s just wierd how that happens. Gotta chalk it up to bad luck or karma or something.

They’ll have another chance, of course. Anyone with an inside line to David Gregory, please pass this along.