View From a Height

Way Behind the Curve

Ed Quillen, the Denver Post's resident ex-journalist and current curmudgeon, is generally an excellent read. He's not conservative by any stretch. He writes from Salida, Colorado, and calls Denver the "Front Strange."

His Sunday oped was about the Plame kerfuffle, and was so factually-challenged that one wonders whether the fine Coloado summer had gotten to him a little.

Every time a reporter goes to jail to protect a confidential source, it inspires some anguish here. It happened last week, when Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, went to jail rather than testify before a grand jury about a conversation she had with someone whose privacy she had promised to protect.

It's part of one of those "inside the Beltway" issues that gets people all riled up in Washington, but it's not the stuff of morning coffee chatter in territory where people have to work for a living.

If Quillen is correct, then most people reading his column are hearing about the whole kerfuffle for the first time. What he says will be the story they remember. You would think that, as an old newspaperman, he'd bother to get the facts right.

In February 2002, Joseph C. Wilson IV was sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate rumors that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material there. A year later, he began criticizing the Bush administration for exaggerating the threat from Saddam Hussein.

Well, when you put it that way, sure. Never mind that the way he "critized the Bush administration" was to lie about the origin, contents, manner, and results of his "investigation." This is a bit like saying that Mussolini was "criticizing" the Italian government in the 20s.

Shortly thereafter, syndicated Washington columnist Robert D. Novak wrote that two administration officials had told him that Wilson's Niger trip had been suggested by Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative.

Well, there are two ways to read this sentence, and both of them are wrong. Novak never wrote that Plame was an undercover CIA officer. And Plame wasn't an undercover CIA officer.

Presumably, the idea was to discredit Wilson.

Actually, the idea was at least to let Newsweek's reporter know that maybe Wilson wasn't all he was pretending to be.

Wilson would do a fine job of discrediting himself in fairly short order.

It is a federal felony to identify an active undercover CIA officer. Thus the officials who talked to Novak might have committed a crime. A special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was appointed, and he's trying to find out who leaked Plame's name. He has summoned reporters before a grand jury, with the threat that they'll be held in contempt if they don't testify. Miller wouldn't talk, and she's in jail.

Most states, including Colorado, have a "shield law" that helps protect journalists from being questioned about anonymous sources during a criminal investigation.

There isn't a federal shield law, and there's an argument against one, since the First Amendment belongs to all Americans, not just those with printing presses or broadcast licenses. Why should reporters enjoy any more rights than anyone else?

There's a partial answer in that reporters spend a lot of time talking to people, and if there weren't a shield law, lazy prosecuting attorneys would use reporters to do their investigations.

...

Now, I don't know if Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA-agent-identity-leak case, is haling reporters before a grand jury because he's lazy or because that's the only way he can get information about a crime, reporters' promises or not.

I've skipped a story here about how Quillen had to deal with a similar situation in the past. Similar, but not identical. Because while Quillen was trying to protect someone who had told him about a crime, Miller is going to jail because the act of telling her something may have been a crime. That's why Fitzgerald is talking to reporters.

I do know that when somebody calls me and says, "I've got some hot information, but you can't tell anybody you heard it from me," I tell them to call someone else if the secret must be kept. I'm a blabbermouth by nature and my business is presenting things to the public, not hiding things from the public.

Except that Cooper called Rove, not the other way around. And Cooper asked Rove about Wilson, not the other way around.

And I'm willing to bet on this: Miller will be the only one to serve any jail time as a result of this Beltway brouhaha. After all, she's part of the Liberal Media Elite, and in these times, many Americans will figure she deserves it, as opposed to some White House source who put an American agent's life at risk.

I used to work for the Agency, indirectly, as a contractor. I knew CIA officers, lots of them. I have a fair sense of how the Agency operates. It's entirely possible that Plame could work at Langley and be undercover. Operatives frequently do rotations at HQ before being sent back out into the field. But if Plame is going around telling her friends and family where she works, she's not undercover. No way, no how. Miller may be the only one to serve jail time because there may not actually be a crime here at all.

I don't want to be too hard on Mr. Quillen. He tends to answer emails, and he's the property of no political party. But there's plenty of original-source material out there for him to check. A piece like this might have been forgiveable two weeks or two months or two years ago. I don't know what the lead time on his columns is, and it's possible he wrote this before the Latest Startling Revelations became public. By Sunday, if the Post hadn't been sleeping off their hangovers, they certainly should have spiked the column for inaccuracy.

Cross-Posted at Oh, That Liberal Media.