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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SiouxPal who wrote (19988)	6/3/2005 8:42:24 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 362340

Confidential sources the subject of prosecution now ________________________________ By MYRIAM MARQUEZ The Orlando Sentinel June 3, 2005 Friday Just as journalists are threatened with jail time for failing to tell a prosecutor about confidential sources who may have provided information that wasn't even published, along comes a smiling old man and his walker to proclaim: "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat." Not the 1970s porn movie, but the former No. 2 guy at the FBI during the Watergate scandal, the "Deep Throat" who spilled the beans on Richard Nixon to The Washington Post's Bob Woodward in a parking garage, confirming Woodward's leads and offering guidance to "follow the money." The guy who led Woodward (with the help of fellow reporter Carl Bernstein), then pup reporters at The Post, to one of the biggest abuses of power uncovered at the White House. There is dignity in being a snitch, and it took Mark Felt, now 91, more than three decades to disclose a secret that The Post promised to guard until Felt's death. What would have happened to those reporters in today's post-Sept. 11 world? Under today's war-on-terror paranoia, we're led to believe that confidential sources are as great a threat to the Republic as those so-called liberal judges that Tom DeLay rails against in Congress. Look at what's happening to Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine. Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is trying to have those two journalists jailed for failing to disclose what sources told them about the identity of a CIA operative whose cover was blown -- not by those two reporters -- but by conservative columnist and TV pundit Robert Novak. Back in 2003 former Ambassador Joseph Wilson embarrassed the Bush administration by writing an opinion piece in The New York Times about a trip he had made to Niger, as a CIA consultant, to check on rumors that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium "yellow cake" for nuclear weapons. Wilson concluded there was no such evidence despite Bush using the rumor as one more reason to go to war in Iraq. In a column Novak, citing two anonymous senior Bush administration officials as sources, took issue with Wilson's assessment and in the process outed Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative. Whoever gave Novak that information may have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. All this may seem an inside-the-Beltway trifle, but there are real consequences to our democratic republic if Americans allow government to quash the First Amendment for the sake of some false sense of security. The White House jumps all over Newsweek for its sloppy reporting of an anonymous source wrongly attributing that a government report would expose U.S. military personnel dunking the Quran in a toilet to harass detainees in Guantanamo. Yet there's little mention by the president, much less a public apology, for the White House's own sloppy sourcing of those nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that led us into the morass that is Iraq. As it turned out much of the "intelligence" the White House relied upon came from Iraqi exiles with their own agendas who hadn't been in Iraq in decades. Does the American public not deserve to know? It must have been difficult for Felt, a man who dedicated his life to the FBI, to see a paranoid president eager to pounce on all enemies, foreign and domestic, without a second thought to the Constitution. Watergate wasn't a third-rate burglary. The burglars were paid with cash donated to the Committee to Re-elect the President. Apologists such as Pat Buchanan would prefer that Felt had turned over the evidence to a prosecutor. Look at what happened to prosecutors who failed to do Nixon's bidding. Remember the Saturday Night massacre? Nixon fired Archibald Cox and abolished the office of the special prosecutor even as Congress considered impeachment. A little more than two years after the Watergate break-in, Nixon resigned. Some Americans will call Felt a snitch, a traitor. Exposing abuse of power and political corruption isn't traitorous, though. It's the most patriotic thing one can do. Thank you, Mr. Deep Throat, for reminding us that love of country, dignity, honor and the truth must always come before misplaced loyalties to any one egomaniac. ___________________________________________ Write to Ms. Marquez by e-mail at mmarquez@orlandosentinel.com