- Archives

Press Ignores the Issue

With a federal judge having ordered two reporters to jail for refusing to name their sources to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of a covert C.I.A. officer, Mr. Novak, whose column identifying the officer set off this showdown, has been under increasing pressure in recent weeks to explain his role. But he determinedly maintains his own counsel. On the C-Span "Washington Journal" this month, he calmly swatted away one caller who asked how it felt to watch others face jail. Then, when queried by Brian Lamb, the program's host, about the matter, he referred dismissively to the reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine. "I don't know why they're upset with me," Mr. Novak said. "They ought to worry about themselves. I worry about myself." The confrontation began when Mr. Novak revealed the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, in his column in July 2003. Mr. Novak's column is not one for grand ideological pronouncements. His stock in trade is whispered inside-the-Beltway tidbits, from an undoubtedly conservative - and sharp - point of view. Outing Ms. Plame, the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who had written an Op-Ed article for The Times the week before that was critical of the Bush administration, was a prime one. Mr. Wilson had written that based on a trip he made to Niger sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency, he thought some intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program that the administration had relied on as a basis to go to war was "twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Mr. Novak responded in his column: "Wilson never worked for the C.I.A., but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me his wife suggested sending Wilson to Niger." [more]