IT AIN'T WHAT YOU LEAK, IT'S THE WAY THAT YOU LEAK IT

Let me see if I have this straight. It all started when President Bush, in the course of justifying his invasion of Iraq, alleged that the Iraqis were buying, or trying to buy, uranium ore in the African country of Niger, in order to make nuclear weapons. This was part of his larger contention that the Iraqis had and would soon be in a position to use weapons of mass destruction, if not stopped by invading forces.

This impelled Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat in the Clinton administration, to take a trip to Niger to check out these allegations. The allegations proved false.

In the course of trying to put a negative spin on this revelation, columnist Robert Novak stated that some governmental source had told him that Wilson's trip to Niger had been arranged by his wife, a CIA operative. The wife's name was not used, but there has never been any allegation that Wilson is a polygamist. And I still have trouble understanding why it should matter, even if true, that the trip was arranged by the then-otherwise-anonymous Mrs. Wilson. If anything, someone whose travel arrangements were made by a CIA operative ought to be able to do a better job of getting at crucial information. And, more to the point, nobody has ever alleged that Wilson's findings were untrue or mistaken, much less falsified. That is, nobody has ever claimed that Bush was not lying or recklessly indifferent to the truth when he stated that the Iraqis had been buying uranium ore in Niger.

Novak's story got picked up by two other reporters, Time's Matt Cooper and the New York Times' Judith Miller. Both of them checked out the Novak story with anonymous government sources. Cooper actually published an article on the subject; Miller never did. At some point subsequent to all this, a grand jury investigation was opened by Chicago's own US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, now on temporary duty in DC, into -- well, it's not quite clear into what. We also don't know who was a "target” of the investigation, except that Fitzgerald has stated it wasn't Karl Rove. (Back to Rove in a minute.) Cooper and Miller were both subpoenaed by the grand jury to identify their sources. After an odyssey through the federal courts ending with a Supreme Court ruling that the First Amendment in this case did not give the reporters the right to refuse to identify their sources to the grand jury, Cooper testified. He identified one of his sources as White House adviser Karl Rove, and another as Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby. Miller refused to testify and is still in jail as a result.

Rove's defense against any possible charges of revealing classified information or revealing the identity of a covert agent, apparently, is twofold. First, he never identified "Joseph Wilson's wife" by name. Most lawyers, given the monogamous nature of the Wilson marriage, find this laughable. And second, when he talked to Cooper, Novak had already blown Mrs. Wilson's cover, so Rove disclaims any blame for having "leaked" or "revealed" classified information. Apparently his position is that information is classified, and a covert agent's identity is covert, only until somebody makes it public. Although Novak is "cooperating fully with the grand jury," we still don't know who his source was. Rove has apparently said nothing one way or another about whether it was he.

The Democratic response to all of this was a great deal of indignation and denunciation, plus a proposed bill that would revoke the security clearance of any federal official found to have revealed classified information. While this is a perfectly reasonable "logical consequence," it might not be applicable to Rove himself, since the Constitution frowns on ex post facto punishments.

And the Republican response to the Democratic response has been to denounce Wilson for making such a fuss about the blowing of his wife's cover, and attributing to him motives of purely personal and partisan rancor.

All of this brouhaha calls to mind an earlier uproar, back in 1997. Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear... Some couple from Atlanta is driving around Washington with the car scanner on, and they suddenly recognize one of the voices coming over it. It is the voice of a fellow Georgian (though probably they would have recognized it anyway), the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich. “Hey, this is interesting!” says one to the other. “Let’s tape it!” Which they do. (I don’t know enough about this kind of automotive communications technology to know how difficult that would have been, or what quality reproduction one could expect under these circumstances.) By the end of the conversation, they become convinced that it indicates something shady going on. They apparently conclude that their duty as Good Citizens is to hand it over to Congress, preferably to somebody on the House Ethics Committee whose investigation is the subject matter of the conversation. So far, so reasonable. So they send it to the office of Representative McDermott, then the ranking Democrat on the committee. This is where our reflexive “yeah sure, why not?” breaks down. Why McDermott specifically? He was not their representative. So far as we know, they had no previous acquaintance or contact with him. We must confess ignorance, for now anyway. And then, somehow or other, by a mechanism yet unknown, the tape finds its way from McDermott’s office to the press.

Let’s fill in some detail. In most states, it is illegal for civilians to use police scanner radios in motor vehicles. In some jurisdictions, it is illegal to tape conversations, or particularly telephone conversations, without the knowledge/consent of at least one party (in some places, all parties) to the conversation. On the other hand, the Supreme Court has held that people who converse on portable phones have no expectation of privacy, because portable phones for technical purposes are nothing but a specialized form of CB radio. There is no ruling on cellular phones yet, but anyone acquainted with that technology would expect a similar ruling when the issue comes up. The conversation in question was overheard on scanner because one of the parties to it was using his cellular phone. Not being licensed to practice where the events in question took place, I’m not quite sure what the operative law is. But these are the outer limits of it, to the best of my knowledge.

The Republicans, however, decided to take the position that the matter had a lot more to do with ethics than with law. On ethics, of course, we are all experts. What was the overheard conversation about? Well, it all started with Newt Gingrich’s college course. He has a PhD in history. Historians I correspond with seem to be skeptical of his professional competence in that area, but he has at least paid his dues, and has every right to teach the subject at college level. But this particular course was apparently nothing but a billboard for his political positions and ambitions. Far be it from this writer to object to that, since this blog serves a very similar purpose. But I run it on my own dime. Gingrich ran his course, apparently, on money raised from tax-exempt foundations whose legal status requires them to stay out of politics. After a couple of years of dithering about this, the House Ethics Committee finally decided that this was a violation of their code, and that something had to be done. Unusually for a Congressional committee, they decided to do it in the form of what would be called a plea bargain if it had happened in a criminal forum--allowing Gingrich to accept a pre-ordained punishment of reprimand and fine, and thereby removing a serious obstacle to his re-election as Speaker. One of the conditions of the bargain was that Gingrich and his far-right cronies should shut up about it. The telephone conversation in question was held between Gingrich and some of those cronies, and its subject was how they could present this to the public. In short, it was a smoking gun revealing violation of the deal.

But all the public outcry involved, not Gingrich’s original misbehavior, nor his later violation of the plea bargain about it, but McDermott’s possible involvement in illegal taping and unethical leaking of Gingrich’s phone conversation about it. You got that? What matters is not what the Republican did wrong, but the way it got revealed to the public under the auspices of a Democrat. Starting to sound familiar?

So can we get back to the basic facts, the things nobody on either side denies, of this particular brouhaha? Namely: President Bush lied, or anyway spoke in reckless disregard for the truth, about the Iraqis buying uranium in Niger as part of his pitch to sell the war in Iraq, Wilson revealed that fact, and Rove and Libby, probably among other government officials, then blew Wilson's wife's cover as a covert CIA agent, thereby ending her usefulness to the Agency and possibly endangering or at least ending the usefulness of many of her contacts. Did Wilson make a fuss about this out of partisan or personal rancor? Who cares? Did Rove break the law? Who knows? What we do know is that upwards of 1,700 Americans and untold thousands of Iraqis have died in an unnecessary and illegal war based on untruths told by our president. This time, let's not let ourselves be distracted by questions of procedural nicety and personal motivation from the real issues of war and peace, life and death.