Plame Case May End With Criminal Going Free and 'Witnesses' Jailed
via Editor & Publisher
As I have said all along, the point of the Plame leak prosecution was never punishing, or even identifying, the leaker. The point was to deliver a horse's head between the sheets of anyone else in government who might think about ratting on Maximum Leader, and any reporter who thinks about writing a story about it. And the result is another great success for dictatorship.
The bloom is definitely off this case. No longer does one hear it described as a once-in-a-generation showdown between the government and the Fourth Estate over the First Amendment. It’s not that it is being ignored by the working press; indeed, several reporters told me that, unfortunately, the Plame affair is often mentioned by would-be confidential sources when explaining their skittishness in talking about classified matters, doubly so given the obsession with secrecy of the Bush White House.
The chief of one top chain's Washington bureau speaks of leads on stories that have "fizzled." A senior investigative reporter for a prominent national newspaper made the point that there is no way to measure the insidious effect of the Fitzgerald probe, in that it has become an invisible part of the warp and woof of the relationship between a free press and a security-obsessed administration.
One of Miller's former colleagues put it this way when describing her problematic role in the Plame case: "She has made it tougher for us all" by, in his view, essentially inventing the claim that she was contemplating a story about Plame.
As I have said all along, the point of the Plame leak prosecution was never punishing, or even identifying, the leaker. The point was to deliver a horse's head between the sheets of anyone else in government who might think about ratting on Maximum Leader, and any reporter who thinks about writing a story about it. And the result is another great success for dictatorship.
The bloom is definitely off this case. No longer does one hear it described as a once-in-a-generation showdown between the government and the Fourth Estate over the First Amendment. It’s not that it is being ignored by the working press; indeed, several reporters told me that, unfortunately, the Plame affair is often mentioned by would-be confidential sources when explaining their skittishness in talking about classified matters, doubly so given the obsession with secrecy of the Bush White House.
The chief of one top chain's Washington bureau speaks of leads on stories that have "fizzled." A senior investigative reporter for a prominent national newspaper made the point that there is no way to measure the insidious effect of the Fitzgerald probe, in that it has become an invisible part of the warp and woof of the relationship between a free press and a security-obsessed administration.
One of Miller's former colleagues put it this way when describing her problematic role in the Plame case: "She has made it tougher for us all" by, in his view, essentially inventing the claim that she was contemplating a story about Plame.
posted by bluememe at 3/24/2005
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