On Saturday evening March 1, Daniel Ellsberg was noodling around the Web
and happened across a story from the British newspaper The Observer that
caught his eye under the tantalizing headline, "Revealed: US Dirty Tricks
to Win Vote on Iraq War." The paper's Martin Bright, Ed Vulliamy and Peter
Beaumont had obtained a copy of a memo from a National Security Agency
(NSA) official outlining U.S. plans to spy on certain United Nations
Security Council members to get some insight into their thinking on Iraq
and the coming Security Council vote.
Interesting, Ellsberg thought. "So I rushed out the next morning at 5
o'clock to get [The New York Times] to see how they were covering it," he
told me. Naturally, he was disappointed. And remains so, because, as I
write, the Times has yet to mention the story, which has received only
scant coverage elsewhere in the American press.
Meanwhile, it's received far more coverage around the globe. And at the end
of last week, the story took an ominous new turn. A British employee of the
Government Communications Headquarters (Britain's NSA), a 28-year-old
woman, was arrested on suspicion of leaking the memo. The Observer reports
now that Tony Blair's government -- with his political future conceivably
hanging on what happens at the United Nations in the coming days -- has
commenced a search for more leakers and is seeking more arrests. Hence
Ellsberg's interest.
"A Pentagon Papers case, essentially, is happening right now in Britain,"
he says, "around a memo whose revelation could dramatically affect the
Security Council's vote. And by and large, Americans don't even know about
it."
Critics have said, Big deal; finding out that spying is going on at the
United Nations is like finding out that there's gambling at Rick's. And to
be sure, there is a long history of bugging and surveillance among the
world body's members, a history The Observer itself detailed in a related
follow-up story.
Fine. But two points. First, can anyone say with a straight face that this
memo isn't an interesting thing? Political strategy has been "going on" for
a long time, too, but when a memo outlining one is unearthed -- such as
Karl Rove's famous PowerPoint presentation of last year -- it's news.
Second, there's reason to believe that the American media's indifference to
The Observer story reposes less in the fact that this is a dog-bites-man
yawner than in the very reasonable suspicion -- or fear -- among our
nation's editors that running this story would set off a firestorm here and
would require, in this climate, more spine than most American news outlets
are displaying these days.
Right-wing media outlets sure saw the potential for trouble, because after
the story broke in England, The Washington Times and the Drudge Report
sought immediately to discredit it and prevent it from piquing curiosity
here. They cited misspellings that supposedly proved the inauthenticity of
the memo, which The Observer posted on its Web site. But it turned out the
paper had merely anglicized certain spellings. It re-Americanized them, and
those charges melted away. The memo's authenticity has now been verified,
Vulliamy says, by everyone from intelligence experts to the journalist and
NSA specialist James Bamford. Nevertheless, The Washington Times and Matt
Drudge accomplished their mission: Either Martin or Vulliamy had been
booked for appearances on NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN, all of which were cancelled.
Once the "it's fake" line of attack was shot down, the gambling-at-Rick's
analogy took hold, and it's held firm since. As I say, the argument that
such activity is not, strictly speaking, new has merit. But is that really
why the American press has shrugged? (Baltimore's Sun, which has given the
story continuing coverage, is a notable exception).
Ellsberg posed to me this hypothetical: Suppose The Observer had unearthed
a memo showing that Germany or, God forbid, France, had been spying on poor
little Cameroon (and four other delegations). Think the Drudge Report might
have spun that story a little differently? Would The Washington Times have
exercised its sober journalistic skepticism and questioned the authenticity
of that memo? How many days in a row would that story have commanded "the
wood" (the front page, in tabloid-speak) of The New York Post? The cable
shows would have been able to speak of nothing else for a week. And --
this, finally, is the point -- a pro-war vote from the Security Council
would have been a done deal.
Just a guess, but I'm betting that The New York Times would have covered
that. The Times often gets singled out in these narratives, and in some
ways unfairly: It's still the best thing we've got. But it gets singled out
because of its unique position of power in American journalism (and maybe
in part because of that little motto up there in the upper-left-hand corner
of the front page). People have higher expectations of it.
The media critic Norman Solomon interviewed a Times editor about why the
paper hadn't mentioned the story. "It's not that we haven't been
interested," the editor said. "We would normally expect to do our own
intelligence reporting." Fair enough. But now the authenticity of the memo
is beyond question. And now someone has been arrested for allegedly leaking
it. Aside from the fact that such an arrest is news in and of itself, it
means that the principle of journalism and source protection -- albeit in
Britain, not the United States -- is now in play. One might have thought
that the newspaper that bravely went to the Supreme Court over the Pentagon
Papers would, at that point, take an interest.
Well, as Lou Reed said, those were different times. Now, our media, even
our best media, are afraid of the repercussions that might follow a
courageous act. And repercussions will continue, certainly in Britain at
least, where the Blair government is still investigating. "The Blair crew
is known for its aggressive tactics with the media," Vulliamy told me. "Now
The Observer's mettle will be tested. We have to resist every effort to
cooperate with the investigation and do all we can to protect this defendant."
Ellsberg was scheduled to speak at the National Press Club yesterday, so
the story may finally have gained some legs. But what's instructive about
this episode is not what will happen now, 10 days after the story broke.
It's what didn't happen during those 10 days -- how the right-wing media
shot a true story down, and how the bulk of the mainstream press accepted
those terms. And we wonder why we're charging off to a war that nearly half
the population is against.
Michael Tomasky's columns appear every Wednesday at TAP Online.
http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/03/tomasky-m-03-12.html
