If there is one thing that defines our current political era, it is the unprecedented crackdown on government whistleblowers. If the Bush administration’s invocation of the little used State Secrets Privilege to silence those exposing corruption is taken as the beginning point of this era, we have seen a steady progression throughout the past decade, culminating in Obama’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers.
In June 2003, then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller learnt Valerie Plame’s name along with journalists like Robert Novak and Bob Woodward. From July 2005 to October 2005, Miller spent 85 days in jail for not revealing her sources on Plame to Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury investigation into the Plame affair. Although every aspect of Miller’s imprisonment is strange, by far the strangest is Miller’s continuing refusal to speak out about the real Plame scandal, and that the entire Fitzgerald investigation, including her time in jail, was based on a complete sham.
The official story of the “leaking” of Plame’s identity is a sham. Despite the fact that the Department of Justice in general and Fitzgerald’s office and Libby’s lawyers in particular, had been provided with information proving that the real Plamegate scandal had started in 2001 with Grossman’s phone call to his Turkish contacts warning them about Brewster Jennings, nothing at all came of this scandalous information. Instead, one low-ranking neocon was convicted and had his sentence commuted by President Bush for obstruction of justice.
When Hillary Clinton appointed Marc Grossman as US Special Envoy News coverage of the appointment dutifully noted Grossman’s long career at the State Department and past accomplishments, including his appointment as Career Ambassador by President Bush in 2004 and his Secretary of State Distinguished Service Award in 2005.
We all know the official story of Plamegate by now: the Bush administration, angry at ex-Ambassador Joe Wilson’s op-ed accusing the White House of “twisting the evidence” to lead the country into war with Iraq, leaked his wife’s identity as a CIA agent to journalist Robert Novak, who then revealed it in the Washington Post. After a lengthy investigation, “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s Chief of Staff, was convicted for obstruction of justice and Richard Armitage took the fall for leaking the name in the first place.