An insightful letter to editor in Boston Globe:

AS SCARY as an accidental shooting is, the scarier part of Vice President Cheney's interview with Fox News concerned his interpretation of his declassification authority, which would have allowed his former chief of staff, Lewis Libby, to divulge information to reporters.

The disturbing part of Cheney's perspective and the part that, along with the quail, he missed is that if information is to be declassified, it should be made publicly available to the press, to Congress, to scholars, and to the American people through an orderly and transparent process. Declassifying information for the purpose of sharing it with trusted journalists who then attribute it to anonymous sources taints the process and provides yet more proof that the disclosure was politically motivated.