The only thing more small-minded and treacherous than the Bush administration jailing Judith Miller for a crime it committed, is Judith Miller covering up her Bush administration "source".
Judy, Karl Rove ain't no "source". A confidential source - and I've worked with many - is an insider ready, at personal risk, to blow the whistle on an official lie or hidden danger. I would protect a source's name with my life and fortune, as would any journalist who is not a craven idiot. But the weasel who whispered "Valerie Plame" in Miller's ear (thus illegally blowing the cover of a serving CIA agent) was not a source. Whether it was Rove or some other apparatchik inside the Bush regime - and no one outside it would have had this information - this was someone using official knowledge to commit a crime for the sole purpose of punishing a real whistle-blower, Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, because Wilson had questioned an important part of the premise for war in Iraq.
The New York Times reporter Miller and her paper would rather she go to prison for four months for contempt of court than identify this person. Why? Part of her oddball defence is that her paper never ran the story about Wilson's wife. They get no points for that. The Times should have run the story with the headline: "Bush operative commits felony to punish whistle-blower". The lead paragraph should have been: "Today, Mr ---- ---- [fill in as appropriate] attempted to plant sensitive intelligence information on the New York Times, a felony offence, in an attempt to harm former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who challenged the president's claims about Iraq's nuclear programme."
Miller's real crime is not concealing a source, but burying the story. A reporter should never give notes to a grand jury, but this information is something the Times owes the public, not the prosecutors. Why didn't the Times run this story? Why not now? Who are they covering for and why?
Maybe the problem for the Times is that this is the same "source" who used Miller to promote as fact, in a report before the invasion of Iraq, that Saddam Hussein really did have weapons of mass destruction he could launch at Los Angeles. That "source", too, should be outed.
My mother always told me to compliment the chef after dinner, but you don't do that when the chef has peed in your soup. In the same way, there's an exception to the rule of source protection. When officialdom uses "you-can't-use-my-name" to cover a lie, the official is not a source, but a disinformation propagandist - yet Miller and the Times have been all too willing to play along.
And that is what Miller is protecting: the evil called "access". The great poison in American journalism is the lust for supposedly "inside" information, which is more often than not inside misinformation parading as news.
Thus we have Miller listening to White House lies about Iraq and repeating them in the Times as "investigative reporting" (for which the Times has since apologised). Similarly, we had the embarrassment of Bob Woodward's special access to the Oval Office after the 11 September 2001 attacks. While reporting from the Potemkin village of decision-making set up for him at the White House, Woodward missed the real story: that, in the words of the Downing Street memo, our leaders were losing track of Osama Bin Laden while they spent their time "fixing the intelligence" on Iraq. The question is, even had Woodward learned of this, would he have reported it at the risk of losing his access?
As Karl Rove chuckles and Judy does time, we are left to ask: what are Miller and the New York Times protecting? Is it the name of a source, or is it their conduit to the White House machinery of deception?
Greg Palast is the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read his reports at www.gregpalast.com
