By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers
OpEdNews.com
Journalists do not reveal sources. It's what gives the Fourth Estate some
of its clout: Officials, and lower-level whistleblowers, trust us to
receive sensitive information and not get them in trouble by ratting on
them. In Washington and in state capitols, officials leak information all
the time, provide off-the-record statements to reporters, engage in
"background" interviews without permitting themselves to be
quoted by name or title.
We do not say who told us those things. We journalists might get thrown in
the clink for not revealing who provided us the information, but the
sources have no need to worry about their futures. We will keep our mouths
shut. It's not just a journalistic tradition, it's also a practical
matter: If we revealed our source in one instance, we might never get
anybody to tell us anything significant in private again.
So here I am urging my journalistic colleagues -- at least six of them --
to break the tradition and reveal their sources, in the interest of
national security.
You know what I'm referring to. After Ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote an
op-ed piece in the New York Times that contradicted Bush's false State of
the Union claims about Iraq seeking to buy Niger uranium, two "senior
administration officials" told at least six journalists in July that
Wilson's wife, Valerie
Plame, was a covert CIA agent. Karl Rove, Bush's closest political
advisor, reportedly told Hardball's Chris Matthews that after Wilson's
op-ed piece, Mrs.
Wilson was "fair game.") (www.msnbc.com/news/976116.asp)
This revelation of her undercover role at the CIA is against the law, a
law signed by the first Bush president, George H.W. Bush. In 1999, he told
assembled CIA employees that those who would reveal the identity of
undercover intelligence officers are the "most insidious of
traitors." (www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/1999/bush_speech_042699.html)
FIVE DIDN'T, ONE DID
Five of the six journalists who were provided Plame's name and job-history
chose, for whatever reason, not to run the story. Perhaps it didn't pass
the
smell test: clearly, the administration officials wished to manipulate the
news outlets from private agendas that could only be guessed at. One
right-wing
columnist, Robert Novak -- often a source of Bush administration leaks --
had no such qualms; even though the CIA had asked him not to use Plame's
name, he did so anyway.
It seems clear that the outing of Wilson's wife was not carried out merely
to ruin her career and to punish him, but to warn other government
employees who
might want to oppose key Bush policy to think twice before going public,
lest something similar happen to them.
Many agents in the CIA, appalled at what was being done to one of their
colleagues by high-ranking Bush officials, chose to see the outing of
Plame as a
direct slap at their agency, which had been in conflict with the White
House over intelligence matters meant to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Specifically, the CIA's intelligence analysts, try as they might, were
unable to come up with the evidence on WMDs, nuclear weapons and a Sadaam-al
Qaeda link that Rumseld and Cheney and Wolfowitz and Bush wanted; so,
because the decision already had been made to invade, Rumsfeld quickly had
to set up his private rump "intelligence" unit, staffed not by
intelligence agents but by political appointees who would do his bidding.
That unit, the Office of Special Plans, provided the phony
"evidence" that convinced the American people and Congress that
the invasion was justifiable. The CIA was furious, and agents then began
leaking damaging anti-Administration information to reporters.
Whatever the reasons that led the two "senior administration
officials" to tell the six reporters and thus to violate the law by
revealing the identity of
a secret CIA officer, Plame was out in the cold. Not only was she
compromised and potentially put in danger, but so were those abroad with
whom she had worked over many years in building up intelligence on --
irony of ironies -- weapons of mass destruction. None of this mattered.
The two "senior administration officials" put scores of lives at
risk while doing damage to the one area of inquiry that was of most
importance to their overall policy in Iraq and to the war on terrorism in
general.
This felonious behavior reminds one of the demented logic found behind the
government's firing of Arab-speaking gays who were doing intelligence and
translation work, even though the agencies are woefully short on
Arab-speaking agents. This is a gang that not only can't shoot straight,
it can't even think
straight.
COVERING UP THE PLAYERS
We don't know all the players in the Plame-Wilson scenario. Karl Rove,
Bush's chief political advisor, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby,
Cheney's chief of
staff, are the main suspects behind the outing, either doing it themselves
or having lower-level aides in their offices speak to the reporters; but,
since Novak
and the five others are not talking, the Administration figures it will
get away with the felony and coverup, since the journalistic tradition of
silence
will continue to protect their dirty secret.
Bush has never showed any genuine curiosity in finding out who broke the
law in this case. He chose not to have an Independent Counsel
("Special
Prosecutor") appointed -- something the GOP would have demanded in an
instant if this had happened under a Democrat president. Instead, he
permitted Ashcroft's Justice Department to handle the investigation
in-house, despite the obvious conflict-of-interest.
As Melanie Sloan, Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and
Ethics in Washington, has written www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/12/con03369.html),
this Ashcroft "investigation" was suspicious from the outset:
"The Justice Department launched its allegedly official probe on
September 26th, but neglected to direct the White House to preserve
critical evidence until the evening of September 29th. Then, when the
White House Counsel asked if he could wait until the next day to inform
the staff of the need to preserve documents, the Justice Department
allowed it. Simply, if the leaker(s) had not been smart enough to get rid
of the evidence between July 6th and September 29th, the White House
Counsel's office wanted to be sure that there was at least one last
chance to do so before destroying evidence would constitute criminal
obstruction
of justice."
The investigatory action in this case has been absolutely underwhelming,
and, for all intents and purposes, nothing is expected to come out of the
FBI's
probe -- at least not before the November 2004 balloting. "We have
let the earth-movers roll in over this one (i.e. the Plame
investigation)," a "senior White
House official" was quoted by the Financial Times (www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/002318.html)
two weeks ago. If the heat ever does get too intense -- if, for example,
the Congress were to initiate its own hearings and get officials under
oath -- a lower-level fall-guy no doubt could be fingered.
AN "EXTRAORDINARY" REQUIREMENT
So, it appears that the only way justice will be served here is if one or
more of the six journalists decides that there are overriding
considerations that
enable a reporter, in good conscience, to reveal the sources.
Not even Novak believes the long-honored journalistic tradition is
absolute. In 2001, he himself named a source that he'd kept secret for
years (the
double-agent FBI spy Robert Hanssen), once he became convinced that
national security was at stake; he did it, he said, because the situation,
was "extraordinary." (www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/printrn20010712.shtml)
Clearly, if an administration source told a reporter that he was involved
in an assassination plot against, say, a United States senator, that
reporter
would be able to tell the difference between the need to maintain silence
as a journalist and the fact that a crime was in the making and someone's
life was
endangered. If an administration source told a journalist some
career-threatening dirt on a political opponent and bragged to the
reporter that the story,
whether true or not, could never be traced back to the Administration
official, wouldn't that journalist begin to at least question the
tradition of always
maintaining the confidentiality of sources?
So there are no absolutes here. As Novak noted, the journalistic rule can
be bent when an "extraordinary" occasion calls for it -- and
certainly this is
true when national security is involved. It certainly was during the
Vietnam war, when the New York Times and Washington Post saw that the
Nixon
Administration was hiding behind the term "national security,"
and published the Pentagon Papers anyway, because they understood the true
nature of that term and the need for the American people to know the truth
of how we got into that quagmire.
As President Bush#1 was well aware, harming the CIA by revealing its
agents is a clear danger to national security -- a "traitorus"
act. If Bush#2 is
elected in 2004, it is entirely possible -- indeed, likely -- that the
U.S. will be threatening and perhaps invading another country or two,
probably in the
Middle East, and, more than likely, treating the CIA with contempt again
while it cobbles together raw, untested "intelligence" from
suspect sources.
I'm not making up this invasion scenario; the ideologues behind U.S
foreign/military policy (www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/PNAC-Primer.htm)
have been
quite open about their intentions of remaking, by force if necessary, the
geopolitical map of much of the rest of the world. All of this is codified
as
official U.S. policy in the National Security Strategy (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html)
promulgated by the Bush Administration in 2002.
DOING THE RIGHT THING
I don't expect that Novak will break his silence (even if he did it once
before), as he's tied ideologially to the political agenda of
Bush&.Co. But surely
the other five, presumably with more integrity, would come to understand
the political, legal and international ramifications if they continue to
maintain
their silence. Reportedly, the five verified with the Washington Post the
story of their contact with the two "senior Administration
officials," and those
Post reporters who did that verifying likewise know something that could
be useful.
The reason Bush&Co. can swagger and bully people in Congress and the
Press and internationally is because hardly anybody that matters ever
stands up to them. Why are there not ongoing investigations of this major
Plame scandal by the Congress? If the relevant Republican-controlled
committees of the House and Senate refuse to ask the questions that need
to be asked, why can't Democrats on their own hold the appropriate
investigatory hearings? Those probes might not be "official,"
but, if nothing else, they would focus renewed attention on the
"traitorous" act, keeping the issue alive -- and such hearings
might actually provide a well-publicized forum where journalists might
feel a bit more protected when answering the key questions truthfully.
If journalists, supposedly the guardians and watchdogs of the government,
let the perpetrators get away with this coverup of a crime, a possible
second-term Bush Administration would be unconstrained domestically and
internationally, doing untold damage to our national security abroad and
to our Constitutional protections and economy at home. In addition, the
press would be relegated to the status of lapdogs, thus abandoning the
watchdog function that Jefferson and others envisioned and which it has
carried out so ably over several hundred years. Reporters would become
mere functionaries, little more than conduits for government propaganda,
similar to journalists in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union.
I am certain that serving as little more than propagandists is NOT what
motivated those five professional reporters to get into the journalism
business.
That's certainly not why I joined the fraternity. On some level, we
journalists want to discover the truth, know the truth, pass it on to our
fellow citizens
-- so that our democratic institutions can work properly, out of factual
knowledge -- and to demonstrate that nobody, not even a governor or
senator or
president, is beyond the law. In short, we are motivated by the desire to
do the right thing, by being true to ourselves and to the best interests
of the nation.
That credo underlying our craft is, at its most basic, a sacred trust.
Acting on behalf of one's country likewise is a sacred trust. May the
twain meet
here. The situation is so dire, so extraordinary, that it is quite proper
-- indeed morally, legally and politically necessary -- to out the rats
who have
endangered American national security.
Bernard Weiner has worked as a journalist for, among others, The Miami
Herald, Miami News, Claremont Courier, San Diego Magazine, Northwest
Passage, and, for nearly 20 years, the San Francisco Chronicle. Holder of
a Ph.D. in government & international relations, he currently co-edits
The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).
