First Amendment Perversion
October 3, 2003
By Burt Worm
“The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. . . . The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.” – Justice Hugo Black, New York Times Co. v. United States, concurring opinion.
The Wilson/Plame betrayal story gets more complicated by the hour as the White House and syndicated columnist Robert Novak work swiftly to cover their respective tracks with the dust kicked up from their frantic spinning. On CNN on Monday, Novak denied that he had been told that Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame worked in covert operations by someone in the administration, a fact he reported in his July 14 column in these words:
“Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. “I will not answer any question about my wife,’ Wilson told me.”
Strangely enough, Novak also denied on Monday that he knew Plame was an “operative,” claiming now that he thought she was merely an “analyst” – i.e., an intelligence worker not covered by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, the federal law the CIA alleges may have been violated by the outing of Plame.
It is, of course, possible that Novak is telling the truth that he learned about Plame from a source other than the White House. Possibly it’s common knowledge among Washington’s ruling class and their spokespersons in the elite press corps that Valerie Plame is a CIA agent. Possibly Novak learned this from someone in the CIA while he was researching his story on Wilson’s trip to Niger to investigate the fraudulent documents alleging Saddam’s intention to purchase yellow cake uranium for his nuclear weapons program. But why would someone in the CIA be so careless about the identity of an operative working in a field as sensitive as weapons of mass destruction? Continue reading →