People often ask me why I continue to write about the CIA leak case. Why spend the time? I’m an ordinary citizen. I live in Michigan and work as a self-employed business consultant, developing corporate training programs. I worry about keeping clients happy and meeting their deadlines and paying my bills. My friends knew I blogged, under the name “emptywheel,” at The Next Hurrah. But they didn’t understand how I got wrapped up in the Valerie Plame story, why I was forgoing billable hours and sleep to follow every twist and turn of the case.

It all started with an argument I got into with one of my blogmates, Meteor Blades. It was July 2005, and New York Times journalist Judith Miller was preparing to go to jail rather than reveal her source in the CIA leak case. Most of the media saw her decision as a heroic stand against an unjust infringement of a reporter’s privilege. In response to such coverage, I asked a hypothetical question about whether, as they become more and more solicitous of administration plans, journalists lose their claim to First Amendment privileges. After all, no one would defend the right of an Enron public relations flack to hide the criminal behavior of its CEO in the name of the First Amendment. As reporters like Miller uncritically repeated the stories pitched by the administration, were they acting in a PR role, rather than as journalists?

Meteor Blades worked for many years as a journalist, serving as the editorials and op-ed editor for two major newspapers. He defended Miller’s right to First Amendment protection fiercely, arguing that the reporter’s privilege must be defended for all journalists, because even leaks from politically driven sources contribute to government transparency.

Arguing with Meteor Blades is a daunting proposition. He is one of the wise men of the blogosphere, with a life experience and perspective far exceeding my own. So to defend my argument, I wrote a series of posts reexamining Miller’s reporting from Iraq. I had a hunch that the happy stories she told about the WMD hunt in Iraq and administration efforts to silence a critic, Joe Wilson, were all part of a unified strategy to sustain their shared WMD claims. There was a real continuity of tactics between Miller’s activities in Iraq and her involvement in the CIA leak case.

My argument was either persuasive or prescient, because by the time the full extent of Miller’s involvement was revealed in November 2005, Meteor Blades had conceded I was right.

My investigation into Miller’s reporting was the beginning of a year-plus attempt to understand what had happened in the CIA leak case. 
As I finished my series on Miller’s reporting, I started tracking a story—obviously leaked—about a memo summarizing the State Department’s judgment of allegations that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger. From that point forward, I was hooked, and I was following the related developments on a near-daily basis.

It was this kind of sustained attention that has led bloggers to a lot of key scoops in this case. The most impressive is eRiposte’s discovery that someone laundered the content of the Niger forgeries before cabling that content to the CIA. Joshua Micah Marshall demonstrated that contrary to columnist Robert Novak’s claims, when Novak used the word “operative” to refer to a CIA employee, he usually meant a clandestine officer. Jane Hamsher was the first to reveal that Time magazine’s Viveca Novak told Karl Rove’s lawyer that her colleague, Matt Cooper, considered Rove his source. With other bloggers, I discovered—six months before it was “scooped” in the mainstream press—that Richard Armitage was Robert Novak’s unknown source. In February 2006, I reported (ten days before the traditional media) that George Bush and Dick Cheney authorized Scooter Libby to leak classified documents to journalists. In May 2006, I showed that Libby’s stories about Cheney’s involvement in the leak case made no sense, which meant Cheney was probably more intimately involved than Libby let on. Jeralyn Merritt used her background as a defense attorney to get clarifications from Rove’s lawyer about Rove’s nonindictment.

But that’s not the most important role bloggers played in this story—most (though by no means all) of the “scoops” we found were eventually covered by traditional journalists. Rather, bloggers brought persistence and perspective to this story. With each new revelation, we questioned and reassessed the dominant narrative about the case. As a result, we often saw through the contradictions and the spin that many traditional journalists regurgitated unquestioningly.

The CIA leak case is a story of how our elected leaders exploited the weaknesses of our media, first to deceive us into war and then to bully those who tried to do what the press should have done: call our leaders on their deceptions. Which is why I found it all so irresistible—it’s a story that goes to the heart of our ability to sustain our democracy. It questions whether we, as a society, have lost our ability to exercise oversight over our government and whether we can prevent it from pursuing catastrophic policies against the will of most of the citizenry.

This is an ongoing story, so I can only guess how it might end. But whether or not the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, wins 
a conviction of Scooter Libby, I want others to know the real story hiding behind the flaccid conventional wisdom. If we’re going to reclaim the 
consent of the governed, we are going to have to reclaim the storytelling function, because the media has largely lost its ability to tell stories with the distance or wisdom needed to serve the truth.

But the real reason I dedicated so much time to this story is that I believe it matters. I said I’m an ordinary citizen, but I do bring a particular perspective to the story. For a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, I studied a literary-journalistic form called the feuilleton, a kind of conversational essay that appears in a newspaper in its own section. Feuilletons first appeared in response to Napoleonic censorship, and in the two hundred years since, they have often become important at moments when political polarization or government censorship has degraded traditional news reporting into nothing more than the parroting of ideological talking points. At such times, the feuilleton has served as a place where writers, using ordinary language, could tell of important events in a more meaningful way.

In Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, a group of citizens started writing feuilletons, telling an unofficial version of events. They shared them among friends, copying them over and passing them on in a form of self-publishing. These citizens would go on to lead a revolution, the peaceful Velvet Revolution. One of these citizens would even become president.

You see, I came to this story knowing the power of ordinary citizens speaking the truth.

© 2007 Marcy Wheeler