Whigging Out: What the New York Times Must Do Now

There were three important pieces on the Plame affair in Sunday's New York Times, though only two got a lot of attention: the staff story about Times reporter Judy Miller and her jailing, and Miller's own piece about her testimony.

But the third piece was Frank Rich's column, when he took a step back and zeroed in on the underlying crime, the campaign to sell the Iraq war to the American people, Congress and the world.It was a little-known group of insiders, Rich wrote, who engineered this campaign: known as the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Their cooked intelligence, spin and disinformation efforts were the real crime, Rich suggests.

The Bush-Cheney product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to sell the war, and any memory of Mr. Bush's errant 16 words melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security official, Stephen Hadley, took "responsibility" for allowing the president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.

It was not until the war was supposedly over - with "Mission Accomplished," in May 2003 - that Mr. Wilson started to add his voice to those who were disputing the administration's uranium hype. Members of WHIG had a compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to other skeptics, like Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner), Mr. Wilson was an American diplomat; he had reported his findings in Niger to our own government. He was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us.

All the President's men lied in public about what they knew about the Plame affair, Rich says, because they thought Ashcroft's Justice Department would always be in charge of the non-investigation. But political pressure forced the appointment of an independent prosecutor, and their skillful manipulation in 2003 and 2004 became waiting for the consequences in 2005.

THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history."

Rich concludes: Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another "victory" for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

That was Sunday. Wednesday the other shoe dropped, courtesy of the unlikely local rival, the New York Daily News. They ran a short article on WHIG--but it has a bomb attached. The last paragraphs are:

Besides Rove and Libby, the group included senior White House aides Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, Nicholas Calio, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley.

WHIG also was doing more than just public relations, said a second former intel officer. "They were funneling information to [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller. Judy was a charter member," the source said. [emphasis mine.]

Among other things, this is a direct challenge to the Times. Rich often defended Judy Miller as a colleague who went to jail for a principle. Though his Sunday piece mentions her as a co-author of a piece that neatly expressed the WHIG point of view, he didn't actually name her as a member.

The Daily News story essentially challenges the Times to investigate just what Miller's involvement with WHIG really was. My guess is that they are already on it, and if they aren't, they really need to be.

They need to devote a team of their best investigative reporters to looking hard at every Miller story, correlating its content and timing with every WHIG meeting. They need to follow Miller's trial wherever it leads, with or without her cooperation (I'd guess without.)

It is a way for the Times to reclaim some integrity from this sorrow mess. Not doing it would be more damaging than anything so far.Eventually, people are going to be leaving their jobs and perhaps the Times because of how this was all mishandled. But right now, this is the story they must do.

As for the bigger picture, the Fitzgerald investigation needs to unravel the whole WHIG conspiracy, not only as it touched the Plame affair, but as Rich rightly emphasizes, the selling of the tragic war in Iraq. Rich sets a high but appropriate bar for Fitzgerald. But by implication he sets it as well for his own newspaper.