NYT Catching Up With Reality?

I haven't paid much attention recently to the Plame Affair. James Taranto takes a close look, yesterday, at NYT's tortuous relationship with the foolish attempt to smear the Bush White House incident (brackets and emphasis in original).

The Times' Turnabout

This column last weighed in on the Valerie Plame kerfuffle back in July, when Joe Wilson, having been cast out of the Kerry campaign after a Senate report impeached his credibility, was fulminating that The Wall Street Journal, which was arguing that the special prosecutor's investigation into the "leaking" of his wife's identity as a CIA "operative" should be shut down, was part of a criminal conspiracy.

Since then, the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has subpoenaed several reporters, two of whom, Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time, have refused to testify before a grand jury and are now threatened with jail. Fitzgerald also demanded that Miller and another Times reporter, Philip Shenon, turn over their phone records, but last week a federal judge quashed that request, which prompted a Times editorial Saturday that contained a stunning turnabout:

Meanwhile, an even more basic issue has been raised in recent articles in The Washington Post and elsewhere: the real possibility that the disclosure of Ms. Plame's identity, while an abuse of power, may not have violated any law. Before any reporters are jailed, searching court review is needed to determine whether the facts indeed support a criminal prosecution under existing provisions of the law protecting the identities of covert operatives.

The "disclosure" may not have been a crime? Wow, that's a shocker! Well, actually, it's not a shocker to anyone who's been reading this column. In a pair of items in 2003, on Oct. 2 and Oct. 6, we laid out extensive evidence — based on information that was publicly available at the time and on the text of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act — that there almost certainly was no crime at the center of the Plame kerfuffle. The Times' editorialists and columnists, however, were singing quite a different tune, and it's worth reviewing their record of pronouncements on the subject.

As far as we know, the first "mainstream" media appearance of the Plame kerfuffle was a column by former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, which appeared on July 22, 2003. Krugman waxed McCarthyite as he leveled criminal accusations:

And while we're on the subject of patriotism, let's talk about the affair of Joseph Wilson's wife. Mr. Wilson is the former ambassador who was sent to Niger by the C.I.A. to investigate reports of attempted Iraqi uranium purchases and who recently went public with his findings. Since then administration allies have sought to discredit him — it's unpleasant stuff. But here's the kicker: both the columnist Robert Novak and Time magazine say that administration officials told them that they believed that Mr. Wilson had been chosen through the influence of his wife, whom they identified as a C.I.A. operative.

Think about that: if their characterization of Mr. Wilson's wife is true (he refuses to confirm or deny it), Bush administration officials have exposed the identity of a covert operative. That happens to be a criminal act; it's also definitely unpatriotic.

Gail Collins & Co. weighed in with an Oct. 2, 2003, editorial, in which they called for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to recuse himself from the case and asserted that Plame was indeed a "covert" agent for the purposes of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act:

The law under which the Justice Department is operating prohibits the naming of an undercover intelligence operative — in this case, the wife of Joseph Wilson IV, a retired career diplomat.

The Times urged that "the Bush administration should not use the serious purpose of this inquiry to turn it into an investigation of [Robert] Novak or any other journalist, or to attempt to compel any journalists to reveal their sources" and said "we oppose 'leak investigations' in principle." But it also likened the "leaking" of Plame's identity to "the disclosure of troop movements in wartime" and called it "an egregious abuse of power."

Times columnists went even more over the top:

• Maureen Dowd, Oct. 2: "For Bush officials, who have wielded patriotism as a bludgeon on critics, you'd think that doing something as unpatriotic as outing Mr. Wilson's wife and endangering the lives of her C.I.A. contacts would be enough. Nah. The group that fights so ferally to keep everything secret, from the cronies who met with Dick Cheney to the identities of the people it has tossed into the brig at Gitmo, had no problem spilling the beans on its own spy when self-preservation was at stake."
  
  
• Paul Krugman, Oct. 3: "In any case, Mr. Wilson's views and character are irrelevant. Someone high in the administration committed a felony and, in the view of the elder Mr. Bush, treason. End of story."
  
  
• Bob Herbert, Oct. 3: "The vicious release to news organizations of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer could serve as a case study of the character of this administration. The Bush II crowd is arrogant, venal, mean-spirited and contemptuous of law and custom. The problem it faces now is not just the criminal investigation into who outed Valerie Plame, but also the fact that the public understands this story only too well. Deliberately blowing the cover of an intelligence or law enforcement official for no good reason is considered by nearly all Americans, regardless of their political affiliations, to be a despicable act."
  
  
• Nicholas Kristof, Oct. 11: "We in journalism are also wrong, I think, to extend professional courtesy to Robert Novak, by looking beyond him to the leaker. True, he says he didn't think anyone would be endangered. Working abroad in ugly corners of the world, American journalists often learn the identities of American C.I.A. officers, but we never publish their names. I find Mr. Novak's decision to do so just as inexcusable as the decision of administration officials to leak it."

Eventually Ashcroft relented and gave the Times what it wanted: a special prosecutor. A Dec. 31, 2003, editorial applauded the decision and flatly stated that someone had committed a crime:

Mr. Fitzgerald is charged with finding out who violated federal law by giving the name of the undercover intelligence operative to Mr. Novak for publication in his column.

The Times never wavered from its view that Fitzgerald should not force journalists, including Novak, to testify, but on Feb. 6, 2004, it published an op-ed by Geneva Overholser, a journalism prof and former Times editorialist, in which she laid out what The Wall Street Journal would call "the Novak exception":

As a piece of journalism, the Novak column raises disturbing ethical questions. He apparently turned a time-honored use of confidentiality — protecting a whistleblower from government retribution — on its head, delivering government retribution to the whistleblower instead. Worse, he enabled his sources to illegally divulge intelligence information.

The Times has now dispensed with the certainty that a crime was committed here, but the idea that Wilson was a "whistleblower" and a victim of the administration persists; that presumably is what the Times means in its Saturday editorial when it describes the "leak" as "an abuse of power." We think even this goes too far. To see why, let's go back to Novak's original column of July 14, 2003:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.

Wilson's response to this had three elements:

(a) He denied that has wife had recommended him for the trip.

(b) He accused administration officials of "outing" his wife in retaliation for his "whistleblowing."

(c) He charged that this disclosure violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

It subsequently emerged that Plame had recommended Wilson for the Niger junket, and now even the New York Times doubts that the "leak" was a crime. All that is left of Wilson's response to Novak is point (b), his assertion about the administration's motives. So far as we know, no evidence has ever emerged to support this claim; the Times and others continue to stand by it even though it is based solely on an accusation by Wilson, who was not in a position to know and whose credibility on other matters is in question.

On the other hand, Novak's sources asserted that Plame had recommended Wilson for the trip, which turned out to be true despite Wilson's denials. Thus it would appear that Novak's sources were the ones acting as whistleblowers, calling public attention to nepotism at the CIA.

In other words, it is increasingly likely that the entire Plame investigation — in which two journalists are being threatened with jail — is based on nothing. Yet as a Journal editorial noted last week, it may end up having a deleterious effect on press freedom. If Miller and Cooper appeal their case to the Supreme Court, the justices could "end up eliminating whatever hint of protection for sources remains" under existing law.

Such an outcome might have been avoided if journalists — notably including the Times' editorialists and columnists — had treated Wilson's accusations with responsibility and skepticism in the first place.

See also Novak vs. Wilson, The Novak Exception, and Demomediagate.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 03/01/05 07:38:34 AM
Categorized as Media & Political.