Jailing the news

The image and the message should be perfectly clear. The image is of New York Times reporter Judith Miller being put in jail. The message?

Just what is the message when the government starts throwing journalists into prison?

The imprisonment of Judith Miller has been one of those forest-trees things. You know, lost is the bigger picture.

Now we have to admit that if Judith Miller were to be put on trial by a jury of her peers, she’d stand a good chance of spending many of her remaining years in jail. When the New York Times editors admitted to, well, lying repeatedly about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they said that they could find only 12 of their articles with such lies. Judith Miller wrote or co-wrote 10 of them. Earlier, Miller had done similar reporting that helped justify the murderous war on Yugoslavia. (N.Y. Times, May 26, 2004)

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) describes Miller as acting like a fourth branch of the government. (“Judith Miller—Drum Major for War” by Normon Solomon)

Miller may be a drum major for war, but she has worked in what has been a marching band for war: the big-business controlled media in the U.S.

So why Miller? The federal prosecutor has put Miller in jail because she and the New York Times refuse to reveal what a special prosecutor is demanding she reveal. In fact, the government is demand ing information from Miller on something that she never wrote about, but which they allege she knows from conversations she had while working as a reporter.

This goes back to January 2003 when Bush said in his State of the Union speech: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Six months after that speech former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was part of the CIA investigation into this claim, publicly revealed that it had been determined that Iraq had never sought weapons-grade uranium from Africa or anywhere else. Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was the secret CIA officer responsible for investigating what Washington calls “nuclear proliferation.” Someone in the Bush administration “outed” Plame through a leak to columnist Robert Novak.

Miller is one of only two reporters who originally wrote stories “verifying” Bush’s uranium claim. But she’s not being punished for that. She probably knows who leaked Plame’s identity to Novak. That is the information reportedly being sought by the government prosecutor.

Never before, even at the height of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, did the U.S. government jail journalists for what they did or did not report. They certainly have jailed militant journalists—like Mumia Abu-Jamal—but have always found a pretext for it, other than their writings.

To jail reporters for their writing is an act of intimidation that has surely already had an effect on all journalists. It is about control of the news and what is reported. It tells journalists that no matter who they are, the government can demand their complete cooperation, even if it is on something they never wrote about.

The Boston Globe wrote on July 6: “Nor is it an accident that this investigation, rather than fingering whoever inside the administration broke the law by outing Valerie Plame, is instead putting the squeeze on two news organizations that just happen to have been critical of the Bush administration, Time magazine and the New York Times, and by extension the entire press corps.”

Of course, this is about the Iraq War. But it is an expansion of the government’s unofficial program to control the media and the way that the imperialist wars launched by Washington are being reported. CNN’s former president Eason Jordan brought this into the open when he said this past Jan. 27 that U.S. troops had deliberately killed a dozen journalists. A few weeks later he was forced to resign.

The International Press Institute says that 11 more journalists have been killed by U.S. troops since January. Linda Foley, president of the Newspaper Guild—the labor union for journalists in the U.S.—said on May 13, “Journalists, by the way, are not just being targeted verbally or politically. They are also being targeted for real in places like Iraq.”

As for the jailing of Miller, the New York Times now reports that the source she is protecting is a top aide in the Bush White House—Karl Rove. Rove is Bush’s chief political strategist and claims to be the architect of Bush’s 2004 election victory. In a background report on Rove, the July 13 Los Angeles Times says that in 1992 “during George H.W. Bush’s second presidential campaign, Rove was fired from the campaign team because of suspicions that he had leaked information to columnist Robert Novak.” That’s the same Novak. A long-time right-winger, he is NOT being threatened with jail even though he’s the one who outed Plame.

Calls for Rove’s firing are coming from several top Democrats. It’s more than just partisan politics. With the Iraq War descending into open failure, the two parties that had both been enthusiastic supporters of the invasion and occupation appear to be opening an internecine war over who’s responsible for the Iraq fiasco. Is the CIA to blame or is it the White House? The answer, of course, is that the whole state and corporate superstructure of U.S. imperialism is to blame.