North America
America - Andrew Stephen reveals Washington's latest war
Published 01 January 2005
The Bush administration, like that of Richard Nixon, sees enemies everywhere. And it goes after them in the same sinister and unscrupulous way
It is not often, here in Washington, that you go to a holiday party - that is what we must now call a Christmas party, in much the same way that we should refer only to holiday trees, if we must refer to them at all - and end up talking to a Georgetown neighbour who is likely to be sent to prison in 2005. But Matt Cooper, who lives just around the corner from me, is already beginning to worry about how he will cope with being incarcerated in the coming year. How, for example, will he tell his six-year-old son that Daddy is going to prison? And how will he simultaneously reassure the little boy that Daddy is not a bad man?
Ten weeks ago, a US district chief judge, Thomas Hogan, sentenced Cooper to 18 months' imprisonment and ordered his employer to pay a fine of $1,000 a day. A co-defendant, Judith Miller, received the same sentence. They have appealed against the sentences and their cases were heard three weeks ago by three judges who have not yet delivered their ruling. If the appeals are rejected - as seems probable - the case will go to the Supreme Court, which is equally unlikely to rule in their favour.
Then Cooper and Miller will go to prison, victims of the Bush administration's spite and the untrammelled lunacies of a so-called "special prosecutor", of the kind that all but brought down Bill Clinton over his sex life. Cooper and Miller are both journalists, he for Time, she for the New York Times. It is hard to think of anything they did that was remotely wrong - certainly not morally wrong, but also not legally. Indeed, Miller did not even write anything that could cause her to be facing imprisonment - but has found herself being questioned, instead, about sources for an article she never actually wrote.
I think increasingly that the Bush administration is becoming more and more like that of Richard Nixon. Not only is it amoral in the same way, but it is also fuelled by the same paranoia over what "they" - people they perceive to be their enemies - are plotting in order to bring the administration down. This is a quest that requires eternal vigilance. Enemies are everywhere. The Nixon administration duly pursued its perceived media foes by bugging the phone lines of various journalists, including the late Henry Brandon of the Sunday Times; the Bush administration, through its outgoing attorney general, John Ashcroft, has unleashed a ridiculously zealous prosecutor who clearly believes that his task is to crack down ruthlessly on all dissenting and wayward members of the media.
The story of Cooper and Miller is relatively straightforward, and strikes at the very heart of the Bush administration's integrity and its truthfulness over Iraq. In 2002, at the behest of Vice-President Dick Cheney, a former US diplomat named Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium "yellowcake" from the West African republic. Wilson took about 48 hours in Niger to conclude, in his confidential report to the administration, that there was no truth to the claim.
But that did not prevent President Bush from repeating the Niger story, which he attributed to the British government, in his 2003 State of the Union address. Wilson then wrote a piece for the New York Times on 6 July 2003 entitled "What I didn't find in Africa", which concluded that "some of the intelligence . . . was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat".
Shadowy figures in the Bush administration leapt into action as soon as the article appeared, seeking to nullify Wilson's potentially explosive allegations by personally belittling him. It was not true, the whispers started, that Wilson was so important that he had been sent to Africa by Cheney: rather, in an act of nepotism, he had been given the job by his more senior wife, a CIA officer. Within eight days of Wilson's piece being published, a syndicated column by the right-wing Robert Novak appeared, repeating the whispers and naming the wife as Valerie Plame. Time followed almost immediately in its 17 July edition with a piece, under the bylines of Cooper and two others, asking: "Has the Bush administration declared war on a former ambassador?"
It so happens that it is a federal offence to out a covert CIA officer, which Plame was at the time, under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act; but it is also next to impossible to secure a conviction, as it must be proved that the naming of the officer was deliberate. Plame's cover, though, was blown as soon as Novak's column appeared. The ensuing outcry was such that Ashcroft reluctantly appointed Patrick J Fitzgerald, the chief federal prosecutor in Chicago, to act as special prosecutor for an investigation into whether a serious crime was committed when Novak was told about Plame - and to identify the leakers.
In theory, at least, that was why he was appointed. The reality behind special prosecutors, however, is that because they are given virtually unlimited powers and budgets, they proceed to ricochet around, down byroads and cul-de-sacs if necessary, in a ferocious determination to unearth dirt on somebody, somewhere. The absurd Kenneth Starr, for example, spent $64m in his investigation of Bill Clinton's alleged role in a small Arkansas land deal - which ended up dealing, instead, with the minutiae of how and when Clinton had had oral sex.
It should have been clear who were the baddies in this saga, and who were not: the baddies were the two Bush administration sources who, says Novak, identified Plame to him. If it could be shown that Novak himself understood the implications of what he was revealing, then he himself could also be a target. But before long, Fitzgerald discovered that Cooper and Miller were among the journalists who had received information about Wilson and Plame. He then devoted much of his resources to trying to identify their contacts in the Bush administration.
That is where the investigation now stands. It has shifted wildly from pursuing White House leakers to going after the journalists who were the recipients of the leaked material. Cooper, 41, and Miller, 56, have duly declined to appear before a grand jury investigating the matter, where they would have to reveal their sources. For this they now face jail, while it remains unclear whether Novak, 73, or anybody in the White House has been dealt with in the same punitive way.
Probably the best hope of avoiding imprisonment that Cooper and Miller now have is if the Supreme Court agrees to revisit the 1972 case of Branzburg v Hayes, when the court voted by a 5:4 majority to deny journalists the same kind of constitutional protection already conferred on doctors, clergy and spouses.
With stunning Nixonian malevolence, the White House has set about crushing Wilson - both professionally and personally - because he dared to voice publicly his belief that intelligence on Iraq was being twisted. In order to destroy Wilson, they also had to trample on his wife, whose career as an undercover CIA agent came to an abrupt end.
But instead of the real miscreants being brought to justice, we are left with a six-year-old in Georgetown likely soon to be wondering: why are they sending my daddy to jail?
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