The Valerie Plame CIA leak scandal continues to unfold as yet another renowned journalist has become ensnared in the controversy.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that Bob Woodward, assistant managing editor at the paper, testified under oath that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed in a column by Robert Novak.
Woodward had been an ardent supporter of former New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Miller was among several prominent members of the Washington press corps called to testify before Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury investigation into the CIA leak. Although she never wrote a story about Plame, she served 85 days in jail after she refused to reveal the source from which she learned Plame's identity.
Miller was released on Sept. 29 after she got a personal waiver from her source - Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby - and agreed to testify, she wrote in The New York Times. Shortly after Miller testified, Libby was indicted on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements.
Last Wednesday Miller resigned from the Times after a controversial 28-year career. The next day she appeared on CNN's "Larry King Live" and has since continued a junket of media appearances. On Monday, Miller was on the "Kalb Report," a radio and television program taped in front an overflow crowd of close to 600 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
She told the show's host, Marvin Kalb, that she chose to protect her source because, paraphrasing Woodward, "one man's whistle blower is another man's snitch." She later added, "We [journalists] don't want to be an arm of law enforcement."
Woodward said he also got agreements from his sources that allowed him to testify, but not to publicly disclose their names, according to The Post.
Woodward wrote in a statement, "I testified [to Fitzgerald] that the reference seemed to me to be casual and offhand, and that it did not appear to me to be either classified or sensitive." For this reason, he told The Post, he did not reveal the conversation to editors until last month. Woodward, who is famous for using an anonymous source to break the Watergate scandal in the '70s, added, "[this] was the first time in 35 years as a reporter that I have been asked to provide information to a grand jury."
Because Plame had worked as a covert agent, it is a federal crime for any public official to purposely disclose her identity. While anyone convicted under the law faces up to 10 years in prison, it is extremely difficult to get a conviction.
The investigation into Plame's "outing" began in 2003 after officials in the Bush administration leaked her name to reporters. Plame's identity was first published in Novak's July 2003 column. "Two senior administration officials," Novak wrote, "told me Wilson's wife [Plame] suggested sending him to Niger."
Many critics say leaking Plame's identity as an agency employee was an attempt to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.
Wilson had traveled to Niger on a trip sponsored by the CIA to investigate whether Iraq had sought to buy yellowcake uranium there. When President Bush used the supposed Iraq-Niger connection as a justification for war in his 2003 State of the Union Address, Wilson published an op-ed in the Times asserting that the administration's claim was false and undercutting a major rational for the invasion.
The war in Iraq has since become the flash point between government officials, journalists and the public.
Miller said in the context of the fury surrounding the war, "People were looking for easy people to blame ... and there I was."
Miller has been accused of trumpeting the administration's case for war by writing articles detailing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, which later proved to be based on faulty intelligence. In the aftermath of the flawed WMD articles, Miller was taken off the national security beat.
She later frustrated her editors at The Times by returning to her previous beat without their knowing. In an e-mail to the Times' staff, Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote, "Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman [The Times' Washington editor] about the extent of her involvement [in the Plame case]."
Miller disputed Keller's assertion. "The allegation that I have misled an editor has been withdrawn," she said. "I leave with no regrets," she added. "The Times is "a great institution, but it was really time to leave. I wasn't fired and I wasn't forced out."
Critics say Miller disregarded her profession's ethics during her involvement in the CIA leak investigation.
"[Libby] is not a source who should have been protected," said AU Professor John Watson, who lectures on journalism ethics in the School of Communication. "She knew or should have known that her source demanded confidentiality to disserve the public interest."
The primary mission of journalists, Watson said, is "to provide the public with information they can rely on in making decisions about important issues."
All other principals, he said, such as protecting a confidential source, must be subservient to the public interest.
