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Originally Posted by irishgrl
ok....I dont know where this is going but I will say this: Reporters are RABID about protecting sources and will willingly endure jail so as not to reveal them.... including my Grandmother, the first woman reporter for the Oakland Tribune...
if its up to the reporters, then its jail time......if the paper gives it up, what's the point????
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We're talking about a couple of different things here. First of all, Time magazine, who Matt Cooper works for was asked by Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald for his notes or they would be penalized on daily basis.
Wanting to avoid that and hoping to grease the wheels a bit for Cooper, Time handed them over. Fitz said that's nice but Cooper and Judith Miller of the New York Times still need to testify. He also pretty much laughed off Miller's request for house arrest.
Now, I'm not sure if you're aware of what Miller's role in all of this is. She never published a story. But the New York Times issued an unprecedented apology due to a string of Miller stories in the run up to the war that were complete propaganda.
http://www.manticeye.com/article.php?id=303_0_4_0_C
When George W. Bush and Tony Blair made their fraudulent case to attack Iraq, the Times, along with most corporate media outlets in the United States, became cheerleaders for the war. And while Jayson Blair was being crucified for his journalistic sins, veteran Times national security correspondents Judith Miller and Michael Gordon were filling the Times' front pages with unchallenged government propaganda. Unlike Blair's deceptions, Miller and Gordon's lies provided the pretext for war. Their lies took lives.
The White House war propaganda blitz was launched on September 7, 2002, at a Camp David press conference. British Prime Minister Tony Blair stood side by side with his co-conspirator, President George W. Bush. Together, they declared that evidence from a report published by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) showed that Iraq was "six months away" from building nuclear weapons.
But there was no such IAEA report. But the following day, "evidence" popped up in the Sunday New York Times under the twin byline of Gordon and Miller. Their article began "More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today."
The Bush administration knew just what to do with the story it had fed to the Newspaper of Record. The day the Times story ran, Vice President Dick Cheney made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows to advance the administration's bogus claims. On NBC's Meet the Press, Cheney declared that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes to make enriched uranium. It didn't matter that the IAEA refuted the charge both before and after it was made. But Cheney didn't want viewers just to take his word for it. "There's a story in The New York Times this morning," he said. "And I want to attribute the Times."
This was the classic disinformation two-step: the White House leaks a lie to the Times, the newspaper publishes it as a startling exposé, and then the White House conveniently masquerades behind the credibility of the Times.
Much of The Times coverage of Iraq in the build-up to the invasion relied on Iraqi dissidents, most prominently Ahmed Chalabi-head of the Iraqi National Conference. This week's New Yorker has a piece on Chalabi called "The Manipulator," which looks at Chalabi's role. The piece quotes a key Chalabi aide Francis Brooke as saying "This war would not have been fought had it not been for Ahmed Chalabi."
Brooke told The New Yorker that Chalabi's sophisticated marketing operation at the I.N.C. was "an amazing success." Brooke met Chalabi when they both worked at the Rendon Group's Iraq project, a London-based C.I.A.-funded program to influence global opinion on Saddam Hussein. According to Brooke, the Rendon Group signed a secret contract with the C.I.A. that guaranteed the company a ten-per-cent management fee on top of whatever money it spent on the campaign.
The New Yorker also revealed that Ahmad Chalabi's niece, Sarah Khalil, was hired last year by Patrick E. Tyler, the chief correspondent for The New York Times, to be the paper's office manager in Kuwait. The magazine cites Chalabi's daughter Tamara as saying that Khalil actively supported her uncle's efforts while she was working for the Times. In April, 2003, after Chalabi was stranded in the desert shortly after U.S. forces airlifted him into the country, he used a satellite phone to call his niece for help. According to the magazine, Khalil commandeered money from I.N.C. funds and rounded up a convoy of S.U.V.s which she herself led across the border into Iraq, while she was working for the Times. Khalil was dismissed when word of her employment reached editors in New York.
So while you're going to watch the corporate media whores spin that this is about protecting sources, I can assure you that it is not.
We are talking about national security here. These journalists not only betrayed the CIA and Valerie Plame, they betrayed the public whose best interest they are supposed to be working in.
Plame's duties included work with WMD'S and nuclear proliferation. Ponder for just a minute how long it has taken to put that network together. With a vengeful little phone call, in fact many phone calls, Plame was outed as a CIA agent and everyone who ever came in contact with, and everyone who came in contact with them and so on was suspect. We have no idea how many people have been killed because of this. It's effectively destroyed a good part of our intelligence network on WMD'S and nuclear proliferation, making us less safe as a nation.
Again, this is not about protecting a journalist's sources. This trumps that. Whoever did this put our country's security at stake. And isn't that a big part of W's line? He's gonna make us safer. The red state folks think he'll keep us safer?
I'll get into the part where this could very well lead to the vice president later.
