It was refreshing, in a sense, to hear President Bush come out in favor of government leaks.

Of course, when you're the president and you specifically authorized the leak, you don't call it "leaking." You speak of truth-telling.

"I wanted people to see the truth," Bush said in defending his decision to release a secret government report in 2003 about whether Iraq sought to obtain uranium for nuclear weapons.

Whether the president's leak offered people the truth, as opposed to politically expedient spin, is an open question. But Bush's admission that he personally authorized this disclosure should induce him to dismount the high horse he has been riding about leaks.

The president and other top officials have expressed indignation at leaks that reflected poorly on the administration. When news surfaced about secret CIA prisons holding suspected terrorists in eight countries, including in Eastern Europe, it spawned government investigations into how the information got out, and threats to throw reporters in jail.

Let's acknowledge some basic truths. All presidents leak at one time or another. All presidents wax indignant when someone else's leak embarrasses them.

Remember when President Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998 to retaliate for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa? Critics accused Clinton of bombing an aspirin factory so he could look "presidential" during the Monica Lewinsky furor. Administration officials soon leaked the news that the CIA had taken soil samples revealing traces of a potential nerve gas agent at the plant.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan claims a distinction between disseminating declassified information "in the public interest" and leaking sensitive, classified national intelligence. Of course, in this case the information was declassified only because the president wanted it leaked. The question remains whether the leaks about Iraq and uranium were aimed at the public interest or the president's political interests.

As for the truth on Iraq's WMD program, that's still a moving target. The Washington Post has reported that U.S. investigators had concluded on May 29, 2003, that those infamous "mobile biological laboratories" found in Iraq had nothing to do with weapons. One expert called them "the biggest sand toilets in the world."

The team transmitted its finding to Washington two days before the president declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." That's more uncomfortable news for a wartime president. Can another leak be far behind?