Bush's 'War On Journalism' finds new victims

In four and a half years of government, the administration of George W. Bush has turned the avoidance of blame and the eschewing of culpability into a fine art. Last October, when asked if he could think of anything that he had done wrong, or regretted, over his first term, the President was unable to come up with a single instance. This refusal to countenance blame has become a hallmark of Bush’s entire government, and is demonstrated succinctly in the latest scandal to have engulfed Washington which has seen an innocent journalist sent to jail.

Judith Miller, a reporter for the New York Times, was this week sentenced to 120 days in jail for refusing to reveal her sources for an article in which she wrote of the unmasking of a covert C.I.A. agent. While Miller was not the first to break the case, she is the only one so far to be punished for it. The ramifications have sent shockwaves throughout the media in the US and beyond, yet it is only the latest twist in a story that – in a just world – should have resulted in the dismissal and possible incarceration of one of the White House’s most senior operatives.

The tale began in George Bush’s State of the Union address of January 2003, when he made the unsubstantiated claim (passed off as a piece of ‘British intelligence’) that Saddam Hussein had been attempting to procure uranium from the African republic of Niger. Joseph Wilson, a diplomat who had previously investigated such a connection, disputed the claim in an article published in the New York Times. Almost immediately afterwards, on July 14th 2003, conservative journalist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson’s wife, a woman by the name of Valerie Plame, was a covert C.I.A. operative and former overseas agent and an expert in weapons of mass destruction. In one stroke, Novak had ruined Plame’s career, thrown away years of intelligence networks, and quite possibly endangered the lives of agents and liaisons still operating in the field.

The immediate suspicion was that a White House insider had provided Plame’s alias to Novak, in retaliation at her husband’s refusal to toe the official party line. The name of Bush’s right-hand man, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, became attached to the story. This increased the complex legality of the case. While Novak would be exempt from prosecution for revealing classified details – the law states that the leaker must have direct access to secret information, and be attempting to use it for harmful purposes – Karl Rove would not necessarily be immune. And yet, in a quite marvellous obfuscation of the true crime being committed here, the White House has skilfully managed to deflect the blame onto largely perfunctory journalists.

The jailed reporter, Miller, and a journalist for Time magazine, Matthew Cooper, wrote articles similar to the Novak report that offered up precious little in the way of new details. However, Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, investigating the case, ordered Cooper and Miller to reveal their confidential sources or face jail time. Novak was not asked to make the same revelations, for reasons that remain unclear. In June of this year, the Supreme Court voted not to involve itself with the case. Miller refused to reveal her sources, and is now in jail; Cooper was days away from suffering the same fate, before his source – by now revealed to be Rove – invoked a previously-unmentioned waiver that authorised prosecutors to speak to reporters, and his notes were handed over to Fitzgerald by his employers at Time.

To have turned the case of a possible felony committed by senior White House official, into an investigation of journalistic integrity in an already embattled media, is a piece of sophistry that David Blaine would be proud of. Yet the story refuses to disappear, and this week two reports have added to the heat on Karl Rove that could still force him out of the White House. Newsweek quotes Karl Rove’s attorney, who attests that his client did indeed tell Cooper in July 2003 of Valerie Plame’s role, but reportedly did not disclose her name. Instead we are asked to believe that the timing of this informal conversation – three days before the Novak piece hit the newsstands – was coincidental

Democrats in Congress are trying to pressure Rove into coming clean and possibly implicating himself, but it seems likely that he will walk away unscathed – despite the promise in 2003, by White House spokesman Scott McClellan, that the administration would immediately fire anyone involved in the leaking. The idea of Bush ridding himself of the architect of his two electoral successes is a tantalising one, but completely unrealistic. Meanwhile, we are left with another journalistic mea culpa. The Bush administration’s war on the media has been well documented. Earlier this year, Newsweek came under severe criticism for a botched report – that was later proved correct – about abuses of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay. In 2004, the New York Times saw fit to print a list of omissions and mistakes that it had made in its coverage of the lead up and aftermath of the invasion of Iraq; were the Bush administration to print such a list, paper suppliers in Washington would need to order extra supplies in bulk. Meanwhile, the propaganda spilling out of Fox News complains again and again of a ‘liberal bias’ to the country’s media, a suggestion rendered ludicrous by the very success of the Fox News itself. If anything, the American media has become more and more cowed by the pressure heaped upon it by the government, and this latest case is likely to encourage further self-censorship by reporters and editors who have quickly learnt that the price of journalistic integrity could well be their liberty.