Robert Novak is no silenced journalist fighting for his right to freedom of expression.
The host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” he is an established, old-guard bastion of the right wing, and is syndicated in The New York Times. Why, then, is Robert Novak causing such a stir, complaining so loudly that even traditional liberal opponents throughout North America are coming out in his support?
Novak is at the centre of a scandal being called “The Plame Affair,” which involves the leakage of the name of a CIA operative in an article by Novak in The Times last summer.
The agent, Valerie Plame, is the wife of career diplomat Joseph Wilson, who had come out in the media one week prior with damning information weakening a key point of the Bush administration’s rationale for the Iraq War. He had been assigned by the CIA to determine whether evidence of Saddam Hussein’s dealings in uranium in Niger existed, and came up empty-handed.
Wilson claims the leakage of his wife’s name, besides being a disaster for her career and quite possibly her personal life, was calculated to discredit him and bury an unpopular report.
More seriously, though, is the fact that revealing the identity of a covert agent is illegal in the United States. A federal investigation has since been initiated to find the person responsible for leaking Plame’s identity to Novak, but no one is talking; not even the White House is answering questions. And Novak, for his part, is claiming that prosecutors are violating his First Amendment rights by asking him to reveal his source, information traditionally protected by journalists’ privilege. Wilson, he says, is just a Democratic “Clinton appointee” bent on attacking Bush-a charge that ignores the fact that Wilson donated money to the Bush campaign in 2000.
Everyone from Times columnists to U of T professors to-now-Canadian student media like the newspaper have emerged in support, not really of an obvious cretin like Novak, but “freedom of speech.” (Democracy, after all, is the usual rallying-cry of those who fear that the balance of power is not sufficiently under their control).
The freedom of speech defense, once invoked, no matter the context, is difficult to argue with. So let’s move on to a more concrete question, namely that of how secret service agents are supposed to operate effectively if they have to worry about someone leaking their identities.
The extent of journalistic privilege is clear: it covers cases where no law is being broken by the act of coverage. If the law is being broken, as it clearly has been, then the law must be allowed to prosecute those responsible for its violation. Since it was the act of communicating with Novak that was illegal (no one is being asked to reveal a source because s/he may be wanted for another, unrelated crime), then the journalist is involved in the crime and facilitated it; indeed, he and the other journalists being questioned are the only witnesses, and that’s why their considerable privilege as media should not be held up in this case. There is no “slippery slope” here.
Neither is this about the breakage of some law that was written just to protect the government from the criticism or investigation by its citizens. This isn’t as Oliver Stone-esque as it’s being made out by those who are decrying the courts as eroders of our rights. In protecting this source’s identity, we’re helping someone who purposefully violated the secrecy of an agent seemingly in order to discredit the name of another, who just happens to have held a key to debunking the now-discredited claims of the U.S. government more than a year ago.
This was no noble leak. Whoever the source was broke federal law in order to close off evidence that would discredit an unpopular and unethical war, not to disclose government wrongdoing or benefit the public in any way. This does not qualify as harassment on the part of the prosecution, because there is ample reason that proves that this case is extreme.
The rallying of the media around this case is a striking example of myopia on their part. They can’t possibly see the reality of a possible smear-being carried out by someone ostensibly connected to the CIA against its own, and so far up that no one in the government will reveal his name to the courts-that threatens the ability of an agent to correctly report evidence for a foreign war. They can’t see it because they’re staring at a small speck of dirt while the real pile of shit sits right under their noses.
