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I thought FW
readers at large might be interested in this expository perspective on the significance
of the jailing of a reporter. It’s not just about corporate media compromised
or whether journalists need a federal shield law and how confidentiality
affects the mandate of a free press to provide the public with the truth,
sometimes by means of illegal leaks. I’ve appended several ‘stay tuned’ items
following this. Links are
live. KwC We're Not in Watergate Anymore By Frank Rich, NYT,
Sunday, July 10, 2005 WHEN John Dean published his book "Worse Than Watergate" in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank
hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus
to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse "gates" thereafter.
But it's hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken
away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote.
No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like
Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate. To start to see why, forget all the legalistic chatter about
shield laws and turn instead to "The Secret Man," Bob Woodward's new memoir about life
with Deep Throat. The book arrived in stores just as Judy Miller was jailed, as
if by divine intervention to help illuminate her case. Should a journalist protect a sleazy, possibly even
criminal, source? Yes, sometimes, if the public is to get news of wrongdoing.
Mark Felt was a turncoat with alternately impenetrable and self-interested
motives who betrayed the F.B.I. and, in Mr. Woodward's words, "lied to his
colleagues, friends and even his family." (Mr. Felt even lied in his own
1979 memoir.) Should a journalist break a promise of confidentiality after, let
alone before, the story is over? "It is critical that confidential sources
feel they would be protected for life," Mr. Woodward writes. "There
needed to be a model out there where people could come forward or speak when
contacted, knowing they would be protected. It was a matter of my work, a
matter of honor." That honorable model, which has now been demolished at Time,
was a given in what seems like the halcyon Watergate era of "The Secret Man."
Mr. Woodward and Carl Bernstein had confidence that The Washington Post's
publisher, Katharine Graham, and editor, Ben Bradlee, would back them to the
hilt, even though the Nixon White House demonized their reporting as inaccurate
(as did some journalistic competitors) and threatened the licenses of
television stations owned by the Post Company. At Time, Norman Pearlstine - a member of the board of the
Committee to Protect Journalists, no less - described his decision to turn over
Matt Cooper's files to the feds as his own, made on the merits and without
consulting any higher-ups at Time Warner. That's no doubt the truth, but a
corporate mentality needn't be imposed by direct fiat; it's a virus that
metastasizes in the bureaucratic bloodstream. I doubt anyone at Time Warner
ever orders an editor to promote a schlocky Warner Brothers movie either.
(Entertainment Weekly did two covers in one month on "The Matrix
Reloaded.") Time Warner seems to have far too much money on the table in
Washington to exercise absolute editorial freedom when covering the government;
at this moment it's awaiting an F.C.C. review of its joint acquisition (with
Comcast) of the bankrupt cable company Adelphia. "Is this a journalistic
company or an entertainment company?" David Halberstam asked after the
Pearlstine decision. We have the answer now. What high-level source would risk
talking to Time about governmental corruption after this cave-in? What top investigative
reporter would choose to work there? But the most important difference between
the Bush and Nixon eras has less to do with the press than with the grave
origins of the particular case that has sent Judy Miller to jail. This scandal
didn't begin, as Watergate did, simply with dirty tricks and spying on the
political opposition. It began with the sending of American men and women to
war in Iraq. Specifically, it began with the former ambassador Joseph Wilson's July 6, 2003,
account on the Times Op-Ed page (and in concurrent broadcast appearances) of
his 2002 C.I.A. mission to Africa to determine whether Saddam Hussein had
struck a deal in Niger for uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons. Mr.
Wilson concluded that there was no such deal, as my colleague Nicholas Kristof
reported, without divulging Mr. Wilson's name, that spring. But the envoy's
dramatic Op-Ed piece got everyone's attention: a government insider with firsthand
knowledge had stepped out of the shadows of anonymity to expose the
administration's game authoritatively on the record. He had made palpable what
Bush critics increasingly suspected, writing that "some of the
intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to
exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Up until that point, the White House had consistently stuck
by the 16 incendiary words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union
address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The administration
had ignored all reports, not just Mr. Wilson's, that this information might
well be bogus. But it still didn't retract Mr. Bush's fiction some five weeks
after the State of the Union, when Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of
the International Atomic Energy Agency, announced that the uranium claim was
based on fake documents. Instead, we marched on to war in Iraq days later. It
was not until Mr. Wilson's public recounting of his African mission more than
five months after the State of the Union that George Tenet at long last
released a hasty statement (on a Friday evening, just after the Wilson Op-Ed
piece) conceding that "these 16 words should never have been included in
the text written for the president." The Niger uranium was hardly the only dubious evidence
testifying to Saddam's supposed nuclear threat in the run-up to war. Judy
Miller herself was one of two reporters responsible for a notoriously credulous
front-page Times story about
aluminum tubes that enabled the administration's propaganda campaign to
trump up Saddam's W.M.D. arsenal. But red-hot uranium was sexy, and it was Mr.
Wilson's flat refutation of it that drove administration officials to seek
their revenge: they told the columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson had secured
his (nonpaying) African mission through the nepotistic intervention of his
wife, a covert C.I.A. officer whom they outed by name. The pettiness of this
retribution shows just how successfully Mr. Wilson hit the administration's
jugular: his revelation threatened the legitimacy of the war on which both the
president's reputation and re-election campaign had been staked. This was another variation on a Watergate theme. Charles
Colson's hit men broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist,
seeking information to smear Mr. Ellsberg after he leaked the Pentagon Papers,
the classified history of the Vietnam War, to The Times. But there was even
greater incentive to smear Mr. Wilson than Mr. Ellsberg. Nixon compounded the
Vietnam War but didn't start it. The war in Iraq, by contrast, is Mr. Bush's
invention. Again following the Watergate template, the Bush
administration at first tried to bury the whole Wilson affair by investigating
itself. Even when The Washington Post reported two months after Mr. Wilson's
Op-Ed that "two top White House officials" had called at least six reporters,
not just Mr. Novak, to destroy Mr. Wilson and his wife, the inquiry was kept
safely within the John Ashcroft Justice Department, with the attorney general, according to a Times report, being briefed regularly on details of
the investigation. If that rings a Watergate bell now, that's because on
Thursday you may have read the obituary of L. Patrick Gray, Mark Felt's F.B.I.
boss, who, in a similarly cozy conflict of interest, kept the Nixon White House
abreast of the supposedly independent Watergate inquiry in its early going. Political pressure didn't force Mr. Ashcroft to relinquish
control of the Wilson investigation to a special prosecutor, Patrick
Fitzgerald, until Dec. 30, 2003, more than five months after Mr. Novak's column
ran. Now 18 more months have passed, and no one knows what crime Mr. Fitzgerald
is investigating. Is it the tricky-to-prosecute outing of Mr. Wilson's wife,
the story Judy Miller never even wrote about? Or has Mr. Fitzgerald moved on to perjury and
obstruction of justice possibly committed by those who tried to hide their
roles in that outing? If so, it would mean the Bush administration was too
arrogant to heed the most basic lesson of Watergate: the cover-up is worse than
the crime.
"Mr. Fitzgerald made his bones prosecuting the
mob," intoned the pro-Bush editorial page of The Wall Street Journal,
"and doesn't seem to realize that this case isn't about organized
crime." But that may be exactly what it is about to an ambitious
prosecutor with his own career on the line. That the Bush administration would
risk breaking the law with an act as self-destructive to American interests as
revealing a C.I.A. officer's identity smacks of desperation. It makes you
wonder just what else might have been done to suppress embarrassing
election-season questions about the war that has mired us in Iraq even as the
true perpetrators of 9/11 resurface in Madrid, London and who knows where else. IN his original Op-Ed piece in The Times, published two
years to the day before Judy Miller went to jail, Mr. Wilson noted that
"more than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq
already," before concluding that "we
have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons." As
that death toll surges past 1,700, that sacred duty cannot be abandoned by a
free press now. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/opinion/10rich.html O’Donnell: The one very good reason Rove may be indicted.
“In February, Circuit Judge David Tatel joined his colleagues’ order to Cooper
and Miller despite his own, very lonely finding that indeed there is a federal
privilege for reporters that can shield them from being compelled to testify to
grand juries and give up sources. He based his finding on Rule 501 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which authorizes federal courts to
develop new privileges “in the light of reason and experience.” Tatel actually
found that reason and experience “support recognition of a privilege for
reporters’ confidential sources.” But Tatel still ordered Cooper and Miller
to testify because he found that the privilege had to give way to “the gravity
of the suspected crime.” Judge Tatel’s
opinion has eight blank pages in the middle of it where he discusses the secret
information the prosecutor has supplied only to the judges to convince them
that the testimony he is demanding is worth sending reporters to jail to get. The gravity of the suspected crime is
presumably very well developed in those redacted pages. Later, Tatel refers to “[h]aving
carefully scrutinized [the prosecutor’s] voluminous classified filings.” Some of us have
theorized that the prosecutor may have given up the leak case in favor of a
perjury case, but Tatel still refers to it simply as a case “which involves the
alleged exposure of a covert agent.” Tatel wrote a 41-page opinion in which he
seemed eager to make new law -- a federal reporters’ shield law -- but in the
end, he couldn’t bring himself to do it in this particular case. In his final
paragraph, he says he “might have” let Cooper and Miller off the hook “[w]ere
the leak at issue in this case less harmful to national security.” Tatel’s colleagues are at least as
impressed with the prosecutor’s secret filings as he is. One simply said “Special Counsel’s showing decides the case.” All the judges who have seen the prosecutor’s secret
evidence firmly believe he is pursuing a very serious crime, and they have done
everything they can to help him get an indictment. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/featuredposts.html#a003769 The Nation’s Corn: This
new evidence could place Rove in serious political, if not legal, jeopardy (or,
at least it should). If what I am told is true, this is proof that the Bush
White House was using any information it could gather on Joseph Wilson -- even
classified information related to national security -- to pursue a vendetta
against Wilson, a White House critic. Even if it turns out Rove did not break
the law regarding the naming of intelligence officials, this new disclosure
could prove Rove guilty of leaking a national security secret to a reporter for
political ends. What would George W. Bush do about that? On September 27,
2003 -- after the news broke that the Justice Department, responding to a
request from the CIA, was investigating the Plame/CIA leak -- White House press
secretary Scott McClellan said of the Plame/CIA leak, "That is not the way
this White House operates, and no one would be authorized to do such a
thing." He also declared that the allegation that Rove was involved in
this leak was "a ridiculous suggestion, and it is simply not true."
Days later, Bush issued a straightforward statement about the Plame/CIA leak: There are too many leaks of classified
information in Washington. If there's leaks out of my administration, I want to
know who it is, and if the person has violated the law, the person will be
taken care of. Perhaps Bush won't
have to "take care of" Rove if this new evidence does not lead to a
prosecutable violation of the law. But Bush also called on any government official with knowledge
of the leak to "come forward and speak out." Has Rove done so? No. So it seems he
violated a presidential command. Would Bush be obliged to fire him for
insubordination? And there's another key point to consider: whether Rove told
the truth when he testified to Fitzgerald's grand jury. Rove's attorney, Robert
Luskin, has acknowledged that Rove appeared before the grand jury, and Luskin
has said that Rove did speak to Cooper prior to the publication of the Novak
column. But what did Rove tell Fitzgerald and the grand jury about this
conversation with Cooper? And -- here's the big question -- does Rove's account jibe with the new
documentary evidence that Newsweek
is scheduled to disclose? If it does not, Fitzgerald would have a good start on a
perjury charge against Rove. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/david-corn/explosive-new-rove-revela_3933.html Just Posted: Newsweek’s
Isikoff What Rove told Time’s Reporter. Rove talked w/ Cooper prior to Novak’s
column trying to discredit Wilson ‘s conclusions
on the Niger ‘yellow cake’ documents http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek/ Also recall
that after his wife was ‘outed’ Wilson complained that it “had Karl Rove’s
fingerprints all over it” and then backed down under fire. Mail scanned by NAV |
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