Jamison
Cadet
This has been getting an enormous amount of coverage the past week, and rightly so.
This is a mess that isn't going to be easily cleaned up. We already have a reporter in jail for having information (but never printing a story) because she wouldn't give up the name of her source. Nothing happened to Robert Novak, though, and it's doutable anything substantial (such as jail time) will be given to Karl Rove.
What's your take?
Karl Rove's game
The New York Times
THURSDAY, JULY 14, 2005
Far be it from us to denounce leaks. Newspapers have relied on countless government officials to divulge vital information that their bosses want to be kept secret. There is even value in the sanctioned leak, such as when the White House, say, lets out information that it wants known but does not want to announce.
But it is something else entirely when officials peddle disinformation for propaganda purposes or to harm a political adversary. And Karl Rove seems to have been playing that unsavory game with the CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson IV, a career diplomat who ran afoul of President George W. Bush's efforts to justify the invasion of Iraq. An e-mail note provided by Time magazine to the federal prosecutor investigating the case shows that Rove's aim in talking about Wilson to Matthew Cooper, a Time reporter, was to discredit Wilson, perhaps to punish him.
Wilson had published an Op-Ed article in The New York Times about being assigned to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger - a claim that was popular among the White House and Pentagon officials eager to make the case for war with Iraq. Wilson said the allegation was unsupported by evidence, and it was later withdrawn, to Bush's embarrassment.
Before that happened, Rove gave Cooper a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove said the origins of Wilson's mission were "flawed and suspect" because, according to Rove, Wilson had been sent to Niger at the suggestion of his wife, who works for the CIA. To understand why Rove thought that was a black mark, remember that the White House considers dissenters enemies and that the CIA had cast doubt on the administration's apocalyptic vision of Iraq's weapons programs.
Cooper's e-mail note does not say that Rove mentioned the name of Wilson's wife, which later appeared in a column by Robert Novak. White House supporters are emphasizing that fact in an effort to argue that Rove did not illegally unmask a covert officer. We don't need to judge that here. But there remains the issue of whether the White House used Wilson's wife for political reasons, and it's obvious that Rove did.
The White House has painted itself into a corner. More than a year ago, Bush vowed to fire the leaker. Then Scott McClellan, the president's spokesman, repeatedly assured everyone that the leaker was not Rove, on whom the president is so dependent intellectually that he calls Rove "the architect."
Until this week, the administration had deflected attention onto journalists by producing documents that officials had been compelled to sign to supposedly waive any promise of confidentiality. Our colleague Judith Miller, unjustly jailed for protecting the identity of confidential sources, was right to view these so-called waivers as meaningless.
Rove could clear all this up quickly. All he has to do is call a press conference and tell everyone what conversations he had and with whom. While we like government officials who are willing to whisper vital information, we like even more government officials who tell the truth in public.
This is a mess that isn't going to be easily cleaned up. We already have a reporter in jail for having information (but never printing a story) because she wouldn't give up the name of her source. Nothing happened to Robert Novak, though, and it's doutable anything substantial (such as jail time) will be given to Karl Rove.
What's your take?