"What the Hell has Happened to the News Media" by Daniel McKivergan, Worldwide Standard, March 7, 2006
"The March/April 2006 Columbia Journalism Review has a revealing profile of Walter Pincus, the Washington Post's leading national security correspondent."
The piece is not online, but McKivergan presents some excerpts. Pincus mentions his friendship with Hans Blix and his transition from WMD believer to skeptic just before the Iraq invasion. Here's his take on Plamegate:
...Pincus believes that the Bush administration acted obnoxiously when it leaked Valerie Plame's identity, but he has never been convinced by the argument that the leaks violated the law. "I don't think it was a crime," he says. "I think it got turned into a crime by the press, by Joe" -- Wilson -- "by the Democrats. The New York Times kept running editorials saying that it's got to be investigated -- never thinking that it was going to run around and bit them." The entire Plame investigation, he says, has been a distraction from a more fundamental conversation about how the White House handled evidence before the war.
The investigation has been a distraction? I don't get it. In some trivial sense, any given political issue is a "distraction" from every other issue, because time spent discussing X could be spent discussing Y. But has Fitzgerald's investigation done more to distract people from the administration's manipulation of intelligence on Iraq, or to draw attention to that manipulation, since the desire to cover it up it is what motivated the administration to leak Plame's name? And as important as questions about prewar intelligence misuse are, the exposure of a CIA agent for political purposes is a rather important issue in its own right, even if it might not have been technically illegal.
