Forget the right-wing spin that the Plame case is unimportant. It is. In addition to the questions it raises about the White House's credibility and honesty, the possibility that it used classified -- or at least sensitive -- information for crass political payback, and the broader implications about the lengths the Bush administration was willing to go to sell Americans on the idea that Iraq posed a clear and present danger to the U.S. (when it didn't), there are the huge questions the Plame affair raises about the press. No, not the ones about whether or not reporters should be able to protect confidential sources. They should, particularly when those sources are government whistleblowers. I'm talking about questions of the Armstrong Williams variety -- namely, whether any of the reporters in this case essentially placed themselves in the service the Bush administration in its attempts to discredit Joe Wilson (wittingly or not.)
As ominous as that sounds, that seems to be the next big question in the Plame case, particularly as it relates to one of the six reporters to whom two somebodies, one being Karl Rove, peddled information about Ms. Plame's supposedly having "sent" her husband to Niger. Time's Matthew Cooper appears to be just another one of the six leak recipients -- and one who was actively writing a story (which is why his notes were demanded and time turned them over).
But Judith Miller is different. She wasn't writing a story (as former arms control official William E. Jackson, Jr. wrote in Editor and Publisher this week), or else the NYT would have been pressured to give up her notes too. But there were no notes. So what, exactly, was Ms. Miller up to? The questions go beyond the right-wing spin whose real aim is to exonerate Rove. It goes right to the left-wing spin, actually, because that's the camp that never trusted Judy Miller from jump street, having long since written her off as a peddler of Ahmed Chalabi and the administration's neocon nonsense on Iraq. Here's the crux of the E&P article dated July 12:
A novel theme emerging in some press coverage of the Plame case raises the possibility of unnamed journalists being participants in a potential crime, and not just witnesses. Carol Leonnig of The Washington Post wrote on July 6: "Sources close to the investigation say there is evidence in some instances that some reporters may have told government officials -- not the other way around --that Wilson was married to Plame, a CIA employee." Richard Schmitt wrote in the Los Angeles Times of July 9: "It appears clear that one possibility pursued by Fitzgerald is whether a journalist started a chain of conversations about Plame between reporters and White House officials."
This idea was first raised by me in an E&P column of April 7, based on conversations with legal sources, in which I suggested, among other scenarios, that Miller basically was a "carrier," around Washington, of the rumor about Plame's real identity, but not a reporter actively covering a story. She was "both a source for, and a witness to, disclosure by sources of Plame's identity."
She may have just been helping to spin the neo-conservatives' gossip. Her "source" is incidental, as she wrote nothing. No evidence has been presented that she even contemplated writing a story. .... But talking to someone at a high level somehow got her on Fitzgerald's list. She may have both received the information on Plame from a high official, who was trying to smear Wilson, and spread it as a "carrier" to another one. Or maybe she already knew what Plame's job was, as her government beat was WMD.
If this scenario is close to the reality of what happened, her "cover" is likely to be blown if and when the special prosecutor releases the information from those crucial redacted eight pages of court documents that persuaded one judge after another to hold her in contempt in the first place. What's in those pages is obviously key to the whole Miller case.
As the theory goes, Miller shared Plame's name with Novak, Novak called his old friend Rove (recall that according to the Bob Woodward's book "Bush's Brain," and the subsequent documentary, Rove was fired from the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 for leaking smear info to Novak) and a second source to confirm the information. They confirmed it, and then when the case hit the fan, Novak squealed on Miller (Radaronline), who really shouldn't mind since she has ratted out sources before, despite her claim to Joan of Arc status now. I wonder if Bob Woodward would be willing to serve the rest of Judy's jail term if that turned out to be true ...
The case makes sense enough that some on the right buy it too, to the extent that the "other journalist" in the Novak-Rove story is Miller (Ballonjuice for one). Of course, that still leaves open the question of who Novak's second source was -- it wasn't a journalist, but another "high level administration official." It doesn't remove the possible legal jeopardy for Rove, either for disclosing secret information or for lying to investigators. And it doesn't make the spin from today's leaky unnamed lawyer -- that Rove never even heard of such a person as Valerie Plame until Bob Novak, his old friend, told him about her, sound anymore reality-based.
And it doesn't in any way close the case for Rove affirmatively going after the Wilsons, not just casually discussing information in order to chase a reporter off a bad story. Reracking this story from to the American Prospect (c.a. March 8, 2004):
President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel's investigation of the matter.
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%>
Tell a friend
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'sets variables
dim email, sendmail
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'put the webmaster address here
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sendmail.To = email
'Enter the subject of your mail here
sendmail.Subject = "Check out this website"
'send a specific page or send a site url
dim url
'url = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
url = "http://www.aspbasics.net"
'This is the content of the message.
sendmail.Body = "Site recommendation from a friend!" & _
vbCrlf & vbCrlf & "A friend has sent you this email and thought you would should check out this site." & _
vbCrlf & url & vbCrlf
'this sets mail priority.... 0=low 1=normal 2=high
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sendmail.Send 'Send the email!
response.redirect Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
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End if
End if
%>
"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
