Woodward Gambit: Latest Move In The Plame Game

by Jack Random

One week after the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, an unknown administration official stepped forward to inform special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he informed the Washington Post's Bob Woodward of Valerie Plame's CIA identity before Scooter informed a quaint circle of reporters, including the retired New York Times reporter Judy Miller.

The gambit serves up Woodward's journalistic head on a platter while seemingly undercutting the prosecutor's claim that Libby was first to reveal the agent's identity to the press.

In truth, how this revelation actually benefits the Libby defense is baffling. It offers a day or two of partisan spin but it does nothing to damage Fitzgerald's credibility (his statement only claimed that Libby was the first known to reveal Plame's identity) or to defray charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. Rather, it seems to foreshadow a smokescreen defense, in which revolving revelations are employed until it eventually seems plausible that Libby actually learned of Plame's identity from some unknown reporter who learned it from some unknown official.

It seems now that any number of White House sources worked the name of Valerie Plame as casually into a conversation as they did the weather with any reporter they could find.

Ironically, obfuscation, smoke and mirrors, is the precise strategy Libby employed in obstructing the investigation. It is what drew the ire of prosecutor Fitzgerald and led him to indict in the first place. This latest maneuver is likely to have the same effect.

As for Bob Woodward, the well-documented "cover up" of his own involvement in this growing scandal, refusing to disclose critical information in an ongoing investigation, his credibility as a journalist is dead and his career at the Post will soon follow. In the event he has not awakened to a stark reality, the political deviants at the White House hit squad have played him the fool. Like Judy Miller before him, he was a pawn who thought he was a knight, too valuable to be sacrificed on the battlefield. They held him back, allowing him to think that he alone would be spared public scrutiny into his executive connections, and then pushed him into the fray when the time suited them.

Those of us, who held Woodward and Bernstein in the highest esteem for their critical role in the Watergate affair, ending the reign of Richard Nixon, are disappointed but not surprized. We have long been amazed at how soft Woodward's reporting had become. His portrayal of the post 9/11 White House (Plan of Attack) was downright heroic. The revelation that the administration was determined to invade Iraq regardless of any connection to 9-11, terrorism or its possession of weapons of mass destruction, seemed to be regarded as incidental to the Post's esteemed reporter/editor.

Woodward's subsequent reporting and analyses have become so nuanced and muddled that he is of no value to anyone. Whatever gods he serves, they are known only to him.

It is a tragedy to witness the fall of a true American hero, swept into the ever-expanding lair of political corruption. We can only surmise that he fell for the seductive lure of the power elite and forgot the determined integrity that earned him fame and the gratitude of a nation.

Woodward was offered a golden opportunity to come clean when rumors circulated that he would reveal "a bombshell" in his appearance on Larry King Live, October 27. Like Judy Miller before him, he was not up to the challenge. He pointedly denied that he had any pertinent information to offer Ð not even a "firecracker." He preferred to hunker down and placed his faith in the White House operatives who ultimately betrayed him.

Woodward's unfathomable effort to draw Post columnist Walter Pincus into the fray (Pincus denied that Woodward told him of Plame's identity) is reminiscent of baseball player Rafael Palmeiro blaming fellow player Miguel Tejada for his failed steroid test. Silent complicity in a White House conspiracy to thwart a federal investigation on a matter of national security is bad enough. Pointing the finger at a colleague is unforgivable.

The Woodward revelation comes at a time when two of the most distinguished and powerful voices in contemporary journalism are falling silent in the mainstream media. Ted Koppel, whose career spans from Vietnam to the war in Iraq, is retiring from Nightline, and the incisive columnist Robert Scheer has been fired by the Los Angeles Times for being too often right from the left.

It is a sad day in American journalism. The very concept of a free and independent media has been severely undermined and the voices we can look to in these troubled times to restore journalistic integrity are increasingly hard to find.

The disease of political corruption has infected the fourth estate and its metastasis is pervasive.

Without a free and independent media, who will expose the corruption of government? Without a government free of corruption, who will reform the press?

Perhaps we should be grateful for the angry, partisan invective that has finally found its way from the American street to the halls of Congress. In this environment of bitter divisiveness and impassioned opposition, the lies of war, the lie of independent media, the lie of an enlightened society without crippling poverty and racism, and the lie of a working democracy may finally be exposed.