Stirring concern: Robert Novak, Joseph Wilson, The New York Times

When I read this excellent breakdown of recent developments in the Plame leak case (kudos to emptywheel) and this Greg Mitchell essay in Editor and Publisher, I find myself coming back to a set of questions some old, and some new:

Why did Robert Novak "out" Valerie Plame to the public? Why did he feel comfortable doing so? What was the point? It's never made much sense.

Why did the White House "attack dogs" go after Valerie Plame instead of just going after Joseph Wilson? What made them go 'personal'?

Why has the New York Times basically "sat" on the current Judith Miller story? How can it be that a New York Times reporter who must, at some point, have been in contact with her editors, now looks like she may very well have committed perjury? (New York Times reporters do not "forget" that they have notebooks with critical information in them...I just don't believe that.)

Finally, as the timeline for Judith Miller's testimony moves back to before the Joseph Wilson op/ed in the New York Times...doesn't that make this story more and more about what editors at the New York Times knew about Wilson, and Miller and Plame? ie. Did the Judith Miller side of this story cross with the Joseph Wilson side of this story inside the offices of the New York Times? And what obligation do they then have to their readers and to the truth?

Awol, in a comment here yesterday, advanced a careful reading of this passage from David Johnston's New York Times story Saturday about Judith Miller and the Fitzgerald investigation:

"One legal theory the prosecutor has pursued, the lawyers said, is whether anyone violated a broadly worded federal statute that makes it a crime to "communicate" classified defense information to someone not authorized to receive it.

Under the law, any government official or private citizen who transferred classified information could potentially be charged with a felony.

Until recently, prosecutions under the espionage and censorship statute were rare. The law was invoked in May to charge Lawrence A. Franklin, a former defense analyst, with disclosing classified military secrets. The statute was employed again by prosecutors in August to charge Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, two former employees of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying organization, with turning over information from Mr. Franklin to the Israeli government.

That case, and the prospect that prosecutors could increasingly turn to the statute as part of the government's efforts to stop leaks to news organizations and others, has stirred concern about cutting off the traditional flow of information among public officials, government contractors, lobbyists and journalists who routinely trade sensitive and sometimes classified information."

Awol rightly notes that the word choices in this article, using "routinely trade"..."traditional flow"..."a crime to 'communicate'"...almost serve to contruct a defense-in-advance for the New York Times and Judith Miller. He is exactly spot on to argue that this may represent the New York Times hiding self-serving reporting under the guise of reporting the news. We had the exact same experience with their coverage of the WMD programs in the lead up to the Iraq war. When we begin to question not simply the motivations of the officials whom our newspapers cover both "on the record" and "off"...but whether the newspaper itself is playing politics and positioning itself with its coverage...we have crossed the rubicon into a dark and murky swamp where whose interests are put above whom's is impossible to answer.

"Stirred concern?"...indeed. How about some truth?

Joseph Wilson wrote his essay on July 4th in the New York Times. How did that essay find its way there? And how significant is it that Judith Miller now says she had discussions relevant to the Fitzgerald investigation on June 25th, before that essay's publication, and before Wilson says he even wrote it? A January 2004 Vanity Fair piece by Vicky Ward (link.) made it clear that Wilson's op/ed didn't just pop out of thin air:

In early May, Wilson and Plame attended a conference sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, at which Wilson spoke about Iraq; one of the other panelists was the New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof. Over breakfast the next morning with Kristof and his wife, Wilson told about his trip to Niger and said Kristof could write about it, but not name him. At this point what he wanted, Wilson says, was for the government to correct the record. "I felt that on issues as important to our whole society as sending our sons and daughters to kill and die for our national security we as a society and our government have a responsibility to our people to ensure that the debate is carried out in a way that reflects the solemnity of the decision being taken," he says.

Kristof's column appeared on May 6. On June 8, when Condoleezza Rice was asked about the Niger documents on Meet the Press, she said, "Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery."

Wilson immediately called a couple of people in the government, whose identities he will not divulge-"They are close to certain people in the administration," he says-and warned them that if Rice would not correct the record he would. One of them, he says, told him to write the story. So at the beginning of July he sat down to write "What I Didn't Find in Africa."

While he was working, he says, he received a call from Richard Leiby, a reporter at The Washington Post, about his role in the 1991 Gulf War. Wilson told him about the Times article he was writing, and the Post, in an attempt to keep up, ran a story about Wilson on July 6. That same day Wilson appeared on Meet the Press; so did Senators John Warner (Republican, Virginia) and Carl Levin (Democrat, Michigan), who had just returned from Iraq. Both Warner and Levin commented that Wilson's article was of interest, as did Washington Post columnist David Broder. Only Robert Novak, in a separate segment, said that it was a nonstory.

When you reread this passage in light of David Johnston's line about the "the traditional flow of information" it's hard not to feel a "stirring concern" oneself that this story has been more about "inside the beltway" and "backroom" baseball than any of us have been led to believe. All this "routine trading" of classified information is done in service of what? The truth and the public good?

It's hard to believe the New York Times on that front at this point.

The months leading up to the publication of the Wilson op/ed now seem to be where the kernal of this story lies. I find myself asking if the answer to my first vexing question...why Novak wrote about Plame's name in the first place...might have more to do with battles between journalists and new organizations than battles between politicians. Was Robert Novak trying to screw over Judith Miller and the New York Times? That would make a kind of sense.

Further, the animus against Joseph Wilson's wife from somewhere within the Administration seems really out of place. I mean, to discredit Wilson one could easily have just, discredited Wilson. Karl Rove knew that; what did Rove care about Valerie Plame? What made the White House go so personal? The current revelations of Libby/Miller discussions in June of 2003 tell us it may have something to do with Judith Miller and the office of the Vice President. Would the office of the Vice President have enough animus against Wilson to "out" his wife?

And where is our New York Times story covering this? Was that David Johnston piece the careful construction of a kind of alibi? The conspicuous silence of the Gray Lady is deafening. Simply put, when news organizations themselves become part of the stories they cover, when they blur how they are 'players' in shaping public opinion, and how, in this instance, they may have moved into actually making the news if not being the subject of the main story of the day, they certainly should not then pretend this isn't the case or that they are "protecting sources". In this context, we are forced to ask whose interests the New York Times really serves.

If, as it turns out, that the roads of this story cross not simply at the White House but include, more and more, what may have happened in the office of the editors at the New York Times...decisions those editors made in 2002 and 2003, in the lead-up to both a Presidential election and a war, decisions that may have put the interests of their paper and their staff above the interests of their public and their nation: ie. reporting the truth...then we do, at a very minimum, have a right to know much more than we've been told. The New York Times owes its readers a full and thorough reporting of this story and Judith Miller's involvement in it.

This isn't the the first time we've been left with stirring concerns.

{Update: this excellent David Corn essay referred to by awol below, is a must read on this subject.}

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