Saturday, February 18, 2006

More on Dick Cheney's Authority to Declassify

Liberal Oasis has a post on Dick Cheney's declassification of documents that were then shown to Scooter Libby so that Libby could use said documents to talk up the administration's policies in Iraq.

The bottom line seems to be that Bush, in revising Clinton's Executive Order, did give the vice-president broader authority to classify documents in the first place -- but not to declassify documents.

Bush did give the Vice President more power than Clinton had allowed -- specifically, an exemption from a mandatory review process when there is a declassification request.

But that is not the same as giving Cheney the broad declassification authority that the President has.

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