Two presiding
deities - and lively ghosts they are - continue to
hover over the present administration: Vietnam and
Watergate. Though the competition between them is
fierce, this week Watergate suddenly surged to the
fore as the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, famed
investigative reporter turned imperial
"stenographer" for the Bush administration,
crashed and burst into distinctly
Judy-Miller-esque flames.
Judith Miller,
who recently quit as a New York Times
investigative reporter, spent 85 days in jail for
refusing to testify in a case involving the
"outing" of covert Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) officer Valerie Plame.
Woodward
disclosed that he testified under oath on Monday to
special prosecutor Patrick
Fitzgerald that a senior Bush administration
official had casually told him in mid-June 2003
about Plame's position at the CIA.
Even
Woodward's blurry account of his testimony to
Fitzgerald had a taste of Millerdom to it. It's
interesting, by the way, that he thought to offer
an "apology" to his Washington Post colleagues and
boss, but not to the Post's readers, who might
wonder why the supposed greatest reporter of our
times swallowed the first Plame leak the way a cat
might a canary and later went out on the hustings
claiming there was little significance to the
case.
On Larry King Live ("When the
story comes out, I'm quite confident we're going
to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as
chatter ...") and National Public Radio ("When I
think all of the facts come out in this case, it's
going to be laughable because the consequences are
not that great ..."), he dissed the case, while
referring to Fitzgerald as "a junkyard-dog
prosecutor". It's quite a sordid little tale. So
prepare yourself for another perfect storm of
newspaper and blogging criticism over the sad fate
of the mainstream media and our - until recently -
less than investigative press.
But I
suspect the real story is elsewhere. The great
lesson of the Watergate era was: however bad you
think things are, however nefarious you believe
the administration's plans and actions might be,
however deep you believe their roots might reach,
it's only going to prove worse as the facts emerge
- and it looks like one small, new fact has indeed
emerged from what Rory O'Connor at the Alternet
website is already calling Woodward-gate.
The source who informed Woodward of CIA
agent Plame's name and occupation weeks before it
was (as far as we know) slipped to any other
reporter was not indicted former vice presidential
chief of staff I Lewis "Scooter" Libby or,
according to the New York Times (which gave the
Woodward story the sort of instant front-page
attention it so long denied the actions of its own
"embedded" reporter Miller), it was no President
George W Bush, or White House Chief of Staff
Andrew Card, or Card's counselor, Dan Bartlett, or
former secretary of state Colin Powell, or the
former director of the CIA George Tenet, or his
deputy, John E McLaughlin, or, for that matter,
Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove. It's
someone other.
That someone other -
according to Jason Leopold (one of the rare online
reporters to do regular investigative work) and
Larisa Alexandrovna at the Raw Story website - may
be former deputy national security adviser, now
National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, a
hardliner and part of "a loosely constituted group
of foreign-policy advisers known as the Vulcans
who advised candidate Bush in 2000 and were at the
core of the presidential transition team following
Bush's election".
He is well known for his
closeness to Vice President Cheney, from whose
office so much of the Plame affair seems to have
been planned. Though not the only suspect, that he
might be Woodward's leaker would hardly be
surprising. He was deeply enmeshed in the planning
for the Iraqi invasion, seems to have been
involved in the touting of the forged Niger
"yellow cake" documents, and was even the official
"fall-guy" (along with CIA director Tenet) for
those infamous 16 words on Niger uranium that made
it into the president's 2003 state of the union
address.
As he put it then, "I should have
recalled ... that there was controversy associated
with the uranium issue" (only to repeat in a
subsequent Chicago Tribune op-ed the claim that
Saddam Hussein's "regime has tried to acquire
natural uranium from abroad"). If Hadley is indeed
the leaker, it merely indicates what everyone
should by now have suspected - that the discussion
of how to discredit the trip of ex-ambassador
Joseph Wilson (Plame's husband) to Niger went
wider and deeper than previously known; that, to
use a word Fitzgerald has yet to mention, the
"conspiracy" had deep roots indeed.
Looking back on Fitzgerald's October 28
press conference, two things stand out for me:
first, he capitalized brilliantly on an
administration mistake. Days before his
appearance, the Republicans started leaking
"talking points" dismissive of the significance of
a Libby indictment.
The special counsel
clearly took the opportunity to study them and
much of his press conference was implicitly
devoted to dismantling them, something he did so
effectively that they have hardly surfaced since.
Second, Fitzgerald's message seemed essentially to
be this: he had been pursuing the Plame
investigation when one or more people got in his
way, obstructing his view; he was now indicting
one person (and leaving open the possibility of
indicting another on the similar grounds). He was,
that is, simply and quite logically clearing his
sightlines, leaving the case itself still to be
dealt with. In due course, we should expect more
of it to come into view.
Tom
Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
