The CIA has been controversial since its inception. On the one hand, it’s a top notch information gatherer for US policy makers and the general public alike --- for example, it publishes one of the very few English-language web pages about Panama that attracts more visitors than does The Panama News. On the other hand, it sometimes plays the role of international Murder Incorporated --- but let us not pretend that it’s a rogue agency, because when the CIA has organized a coup, manipulated an election, assassinated a leader or tortured someone for information it has always been at the behest of the President of the United States and his political appointees.
Recall that in World War II the analogous US agency was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which did an excellent job, drawing on the deep pool of talent inherent the grand political coalition that was mustered to defeat fascism. But after the war that coalition broke up and the leftists who had played honorable roles in the wartime agency were not to be trusted in Cold War intelligence operations. Thus the OSS was supplanted by the CIA, which became a Yale good old boys’ club and repository for experts on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and for right wing ideologues.
It was because the United States emerged from the Second World War as a superpower, whose politicians did not hesitate to assert their power to interfere in the political processes of countries around the world, that the CIA acquired an odious reputation in many quarters. Many of the agency’s more sordid escapades became known. A number of CIA agents whose identities became known paid with their lives.
And so it was that a US law was passed, with the support of right wing Republicans most of all, that makes it a crime to reveal the identity of a CIA agent.
The Bush administration has violated this law for the most reprehensible reasons.
Former diplomat Joseph Wilson, sent to investigate a story about Saddam Hussein’s attempts to obtain uranium for nuclear weapons from the North African country of Niger, came back with a report that George W. Bush, then grasping for “evidence” to support his already-made decision to embark on a “preventive war” against Iraq, didn’t want to hear. The documentary basis of the story was a hoax, and Iraq had not in fact obtained uranium from Niger, nor were there indications that it had tried to do so. When, even after Iraq had been invaded and it was ever more apparent that the weapons of mass destruction story was false, the Bush administration continued to assert the uranium from Niger claim, Wilson went public and published his findings.
The Bush administration retaliated by revealing the fact that the diplomat’s wife, one Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA agent. The story was broken first through conservative pundit Robert Novak and then several other journalists for America’s corporate mainstream media. Plame’s “outing” was so outrageous that there was a great hue and cry, and the Bush administration’s Justice Department began an investigation. The reporters that the Bush administration had used to destroy Ms. Plame for her husband’s political incorrectness were called to testify before a federal grand jury.
In that process Time reporter Matthew Cooper, facing the prospect of an indefinite jail term, named Vice-President Richard Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, as one of his sources. Novak, who has not disclosed whether he has been called before a grand jury or pressured to reveal his sources, originally cited two "senior administration officials" as the people from whom he got the information that Plame was a CIA agent.
As this issue of The Panama News went to press, neither Libby nor any other member of the Bush administration had been charged with the crime of identifying Plame, Libby still had his job and Cheney was still George W. Bush’s running mate. Even if President Bush can plausibly claim that he was “out of the loop,” the continued presence of Libby and Cheney on his team amounts to a ratification of the crime that his administration has committed against Valerie Plame.
So there it is: a scandal that by all rights should be front and center in the US presidential election campaign. It’s also a scandal within American journalism.
Yes, much of what goes by the name of investigative journalism is the confluence of interests among sources with various motives to reveal a story and reporters looking for scoops that will enhance their reputations. Politicians and journalists use one another all the time.
However, any valid concept of journalistic ethics will weigh the news value of a fact or a story against the harm that its publication might do. That, for example, is why ethical journalists generally don’t reveal the names of rape victims. That balancing act is also why The Panama News will not torment grieving families by publishing gory photos of cadavers like La Critica and El Siglo do.
In this case no public policy was served, and the national debate about the wisdom of invading Iraq was not illuminated by, the revelation of this CIA agent’s identity. The story was not newsworthy. There was only one use for this story, which was to oppress a woman because her husband reported an important truth that George W. Bush did not want the American people to hear.
The Panama News stands by colleagues in the United States who resist threats of imprisonment calculated to make them identify confidential sources. But when some of these same people are in that predicament because they allowed themselves to become instruments of political revenge without regard to the newsworthiness of the story they were covering, we also have to conclude that these journalists’ behavior was unethical to the point of being downright vicious. The people who published the Bush administration’s leak about Plame were not acting as independent reporters of the news, but as partisan attack dogs.
Having said that, what can we say about the Bush administration?
As in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, again in this case we see George W. Bush and his top appointees turning low level subordinates into scapegoats when the scandalous nature of the administration’s policies comes to public attention. This habit of betraying subordinates in order to shift blame is the antithesis of leadership. It is the hallmark of a commander in chief who’s unfit to command.
Moreover, Valerie Plame’s CIA career was ruined because her husband told the truth about part of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction myth. When an administration sinks to such depths to suppress facts that don't coincide with its public claims, it’s the hallmark of a president whose word is not to be trusted.
