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Big Stories and Hidden Sources: Comments on Plame Investigation and Detention Centers
Share / Recommend - Comment - Print - Wednesday, Nov 23, 05, 8:17AM
If I happened to be in charge of the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, I'd award one to neocon-friendly Claudia Rosett for her work on the U.N. oil-for-food scandal and the other to Dana Priest for her writing on America's secret intelligence institutions and her recent revelations about secret Eastern European detention centers.
Rosett's and my views on U.S. foreign policy diverge pretty significantly, and I think that her writing about Kofi Annan and some aspects of the oil-for-food scandal are over-zealous, there is no doubt that she broke the story, cultivatated it, and made it a significant policy matter for the U.S., the U.N., and the world. The United Nations will have to overcome the credibility problems that oil-for-food has created in the minds of many -- and I think it will -- but it doesn't alter the significance of Rosett's work.
But Dana Priest of the Washington Post also has broken important ground on all sorts of stories -- from rendition policies and practices, to WMD intel hyping in the White House, to the revelation that the U.S. government was hiding some detainees in hidden detention centers in Eastern Europe.
TWN has been hounding Dana Priest lately, in as friendly a manner as possible. She is impeccably professional and hasn't helped me on any aspect of any of the stories I've been digging into. I think if she had helped me know who a source was -- or had helped me learn directly whether she had spoken to a grand jury investigation or not, she would have been violating some node of trust somewhere in the chain.
The other day, I wrote about a September 28, 2003 article that she co-authored with Washington Post writer Mike Allen. That article identifies a senior administration source who was bothered by the behavior of two other officials engaged in a Valerie Plame leak campaign. I speculated that this official might have been John Bellinger, Stephen Hadley, or Richard Armitage. Others on this blog have suggested it was George Tenet himself, or Colin Powell, or others.
I have been digging into subsequent reporting by Mike Allen and Dana Priest on the Valerie Plame outing -- and two things appear. First, there has been no retraction or softening of the statements by the unnamed source in later pieces; in other words, no modification of the story. But at the same time, the senior administration source disappears from view in later stories.
Since Dana Priest could not or would not help us understand more about this source and would not answer queries about whether she or Mike Allen had been interviewed by Fitzgerald's investigators, I had to develop other sources -- and learned that neither Priest nor Mike Allen had testified before the grand jury. My source indicated that it is unlikely that they had met with Fitzgerald's investigators either, but my source was not definitive on that front. I have since found another source who indicated that the Washington Post senior management anticipated that Mike Allen and Dana Priest would be called to testify before the grand jury -- and then were surprised when this did not happen.
Thus, I have speculated that Fitzgerald knows who Dana Priest's and Mike Allen's source was and that this source -- who was disdainful of what appears to be Rove's and Libby's behavior -- was cooperating in a non-public way with Fitzgerald.
You can read my longish post on this the other day, but there is another possibility. I spoke to a well-informed and connected Washington Post reporter recently with some familiarity with these national security topics, and this source -- who did not state that he/she was familiar with the Priest/Allen source -- did suggest that sources can get wobbly. In this particular case, according to the person to whom I was speaking, a source might have become "confused" as to what occurred before the Novak article and what after.
Wow. Well, that is another possibility. The source who was cooperating with Priest and Allen might have dried up -- or might have become "unsure" about dates, actions, and people. If this did happen to the Priest/Allen source, then the individual may have confessed to Fitzgerald he was the source but had made errors in his story -- or alternatively, the source may be real, may not have faltered, and may still be lurking out there as Fitzgerald's "Deep Throat".
I felt it was important to share this possibility about a potentially wobbly source, because sources can go wobbly -- and at that point -- there should be an accounting and reconciliation with what is real and what is not. This happened to TWN on the subject of Patrick Fitzgerald expanding his office space. Once my two sources collapsed, I felt it important to immediately correct what I had originally reported.
The individual with whom I was speaking about the Priest/Allen source simply shared a scenario with me that I had not considered -- so I wanted to share that. I would be very surprised if this scenario is correct because it would have put a burden on Mike Allen and Dana Priest to indicate that their "insider source" had faulty recollection about the Plame outing campaign. I have read their story carefully, and the individual they cite states that two individuals in the White House engaged in a campaign of revenge against Joe Wilson by outing to journalists the covert identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson. This reporting implies that the source believed that the outing was purposeful and involved the conveyance of secret information that the White House knew to journalists.
That sounds like a materially important observation to TWN.
But Dana Priest has had other major scoops as well -- perhaps the greatest recent one being the revelations about secret detention centers abroad where American authorities and/or their proxies are detaining prisoners in an "off the books" manner.
Immediately, after Priest's story, Senate Republicans began attacking each other -- thinking that one or more of them had spilled classified information to Dana Priest as the revelation of such detention centers was allegedly made by Vice President Cheney at a Republican caucus meeting in the Senate. Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert actually called for an investigation of who leaked the information to Priest rather than calling for an investigation of the secret detention facilities.
TWN has spent the last several days groveling, promising baby-sitting sessions, trading information I had from some research in areas others were interested in for information on Dana Priest's work -- and it has been tough. Dana Priest is an astoundingly good investigative journalist and does not leave a large footprint.
But TWN has confirmed from multiple sources that the Senate Republican blame-fest after the Dana Priest article was even more theatrically absurd because Priest had no single source on that story. She had many, many sources in the U.S. and in Europe.
We have reached such a level of obsession with information and sources -- and have personalized and celebritized some of these sources and commentators -- that we incorrectly assume that a single person walks out with information that a reporter like Dana Priest might use. Her work deserves a Pulitzer because it is based on old-fashioned, disciplined investigative journalism that involved interviews with literally hundreds of people.
The detention center story is ripe for others to write more. There is evidence out there on these centers -- and more work can be done. But don't look for a single source; look for the dozens who will convey what has been happening and confirm.
More later.
-- Steve Clemons
UPDATE: Needlenose has some other interesting commentary on this same subject. Well worth reading. SCC
Great post. So, Steve's a foreign policy wonk, investigator, researcher, writer, and...babysitter too! Multi-talented guy!
Steve, good post. one comment: wobbly source on office space is quite a different category from a story on releasing classified information about covert agents and front companies.
Well, dang it, if ya wanna get to the bottom of this Plamegate thing, you're just going to have to start drilling holes in people's heads until someone spills the beans. Its the new American way.
BTW, speaking about Plame........
TOM HENEGHAN REPORTS BUSH WHITE HOUSE ABOUT TO COLLAPSE WITH THE "SMOKING GUN" EVIDENCE OF PLANTING WMD'S IN IRAQ
by Scott Mowry
11.22.05
Tom Heneghan appeared in a short audio briefing on cloakanddagger.de for Tuesday, November 22, 2005 and made a bold prediction in light of the recent revelations of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
Heneghan has been reporting for a week now that the primary reason for the outing Plame was not in retribution against her husband Joe Wilson for disputing claims that the government of Niger had supplied Iraq with nuclear materials. But rather she was outed for the role of her CIA team in the interruption of a covert plan to smuggle weapons of mass destruction into Iraq before the war. Heneghan is now saying that this new evidence is the smoking gun about to crumble the Bush administration at any time now.
continues at...... http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DiscerningAngels/message/11552
Steve, I think Dana Priest well deserves praise for her outstanding reporting over the last few years. Thank you for the opportunity to join you in expressing appreciation for her contributions to the reality-based community.
Because on top of being one of the very best and smartest journalists on the national security beat, Dana Priest is also cute. I'd say life is unfair. No Pulitzer for her! She's already too gifted :)
I spoke to a well-informed and connected Washington Post reporter recently with some familiarity with these national security topics, and this source -- who did not state that he/she was familiar with the Priest/Allen source -- did suggest that sources can get wobbly. In this particular case, according to the person to whom I was speaking, a source might have become "confused" as to what occurred before the Novak article and what after.
This exact theory was floated back in October 2003, and I happened to post about it at the time -- both when Newsweek wrote about it (presumably another Rove-via-Isikoff special) and when the SAO reappeared in the Post, implicitly standing behind his story.
First, there has been no retraction or softening of the statements by the unnamed source in later pieces; in other words, no modification of the story. But at the same time, the senior administration source disappears from view in later stories.
Well, if the SAO simply overheard a bunch of calls from Air Force One, how much more can he say after telling that story? And don't forget, there were all those leaks about the State Dept. memo on the plane. Who do you think was behind those?
Glad to see the payoff, Steve, though I'm with Swopa and the possibility of the source drying up seems to have been addressed by the October 12 2003 WaPo column, as long as the source talked to the authors and elaborated on the calls in the second half of the previous week, after the Newsweek article was posted. That Newsweek article contains one interesting tidbit I had never noticed before, which is that Isikoff and Hosenball may know who the journalist was who called Wilson to tell him that the administration was coming after him (unless the info they report in this regard came only from Wilson). Who knows, maybe it was one of them.
The other thing worth noting is that Priest and Allen's source appears to have named the leakers for Priest and/or Allen, just not on the record.
I admire Dana Priest and would love to see her get a Pulitzer, but I could not help reading this piece in the context of current discussion of anonymous sourcing and noticing certain biases:
1) That "news" or important news is stuff the government or official sources would rather not be known:secrets, classified or not. Many Americans still believe Saddam had close cooperative ties to al Qaeda, and while the repetition of the contrary may not be interesting or entertaining to the informed, it is very important.
2) Since 1) is the important information it inexorably leads to the cultivation of anonymous sources and access to high and low-level gov't officials, and the sorts of journalistic corruption so widely demonstrated in Plamegate, Judy Miller, and the run-up to the Iraq War.
Again, Priest got a great story, but the breathless admiration of her skill at getting the right people to talk anonymously just strikes me as an example of the systemic corruption at the heart of the Washington press corps.
Yes, to endorse an earlier commentator: how about a Pulitzer for Murray Weiss, too?
His most recent revelation that a White House PDB directly informed Bush and Cheney that Iraq had no connection with Al Queda, that Hussein was even suspicious of Al Queda, explodes the White House alibi that their intelligence was wrong.
Murray's had a lot of other good exposes, especially on the Plame case.
Swopa - Thanks for the reminder; I was confusing that episode with another episode from Wilson's book where an as yet unnamed journalists tells Wilson something important.
But, while we're on Pincus, I've got a sinking feeling: if, as I strongly suspect is the case, Steve's WaPo reporter is Pincus, what Steve tells us dramatically raises the probability that in fact the originator of the 1x2x6 claim has gone wobbly. Pincus was himself was one of the authors of the October 12, 2003 followup in which the source elaborated on his claim, so Pincus would be in a position to know. It is possible, of course, that Allen, co-author on both articles, was the conduit for information from the source. But even so, how probable is it that Pincus is not familiar with the Priest/Allen source? Assuming he is Steve's source, then, I think we have to take his suggestion that the source may indeed have become confused about what occurred before the Novak article and what after much more as a hint of what he knows than as speculation.
Two qualifications. First, it would be surprising, as Steve suggests, that the WaPo would never clarify things if the source had indeed gone wobbly. Second, it remains possible that the source told the WaPo reporters that he was unsure of dates and actions for more or less public consumption, but was in fact sure and saved it for Fitzgerald. Still, Steve's reporting raises as a serious possibility that Priest/Allen's source has backed off, regardless of the October 12, 2003 reassertion of 1x2x6.
Sir, thank you for analyzing this. As someone coming late to the party, its good to have perspectives like this help fill in the speculative gaps.
The UN oil-for-food programme was a huge success, feeding millions of Iraqis for many years. That a tiny proportion of the money from Iraqi oil was siphoned off is inconsequential and was widely known at the time.
The former head of the UN programme, Irish-born Denis Halliday eloquently describes the programme and the US attitude towards Iraq in a Salon article.
Quote:
""Oil for food" was designed to fail. It was designed to stop further deterioration in Iraq at a time when famine conditions prevailed. That's exactly what it has done. It has maintained quasi-famine conditions for many Iraqis now for over six years. So we've nothing to be proud of -- all we've done is stave off mass starvation.
Now the problem is the political game being played by Washington and London, in particular via the 661 Committee -- the sanctions committee. There's now over $5 billion worth of essential pharmaceutical and medical goods and equipment on hold. But the fact is that this program was never designed to resolve the crisis of Iraq; it was not designed to resolve the economic collapse -- in fact the money is not to be used, according to the Security Council, for investment or reconstruction of important infrastructure. And as we know, in the case of Iraq today, the majority of children die from water-borne disease, not from starvation per se."
Dana Priest's source could also be the one behind Murray Waas's article. This leak about the PDB is arguably the closest we've come to a smoking gun on the manipulation and misrepresentation of pre-war intelligence. Waas's piece was based on information from "current and former government officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter."
Later, he lists those who might have had "firsthand knowledge of the matter." It's a short list:
"The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of
State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records."
It looks like somebody is talking...again.
"This leak about the PDB is arguably the closest we've come to a smoking gun on the manipulation and misrepresentation of pre-war intelligence."
Whats the Downing Street Memo? Corned Beef?
Whats the Downing Street Memo? Corned Beef?
"Arguably," I said. The PDB is going to be less easy for them to wriggle out of. Together they are a smackdown.
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