Hard times in New York(New York Times)

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The paper that regards itself as America's supreme journal of record is washing its dirty laundry in public. And a large cast of characters is getting splashed with water

Nothing quite resembles the atmosphere just before a hurricane. A sense of foreboding hangs in the unnaturally warm and leaden air. Though the wind has not yet really picked up, ominous sea swells begin to batter the beaches. Those who cannot escape board up their houses and hope somehow that the inevitable storm will shift course at the 11th hour, sparing them the worst. That, precisely, is the mood at the White House as the special prosecutor into the CIA leak affair prepares to deliver his conclusions. Outwardly it is business as usual: "a little background noise", and " people opining" was how George Bush tried to brush the matter aside last week. In truth, all Washington is holding its breath, and there is no mistaking the anxiety beneath the presidential bravado.

Nature's hurricanes, it has been said, begin with the flutter of a butterfly's wings somewhere over tropical Africa. The political storm poised to break here began scarcely more consequentially back on 14 July 2003, in a newspaper column that revealed the identity of a covert CIA operative called Valerie Plame. She was, it transpired, the wife of a former US ambassador named Joseph Wilson, who had just emerged as a virulent critic of the war in Iraq and, in particular, of the White House's claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking to build nuclear weapons. The deliberate leak of a CIA agent's name is a crime under US law, and Patrick Fitzgerald, a federal prosecutor from Chicago, was assigned to investigate the case, and a grand jury installed.

Mr Fitzgerald has now concluded his inquiry, and the little squall of two years ago threatens to strike Washington as a category 5 hurricane. The theory is that Ms Plame was "outed" by the Bush crowd, as an act of vengeance against her husband. It is widely predicted that Mr Fitzgerald will issue indictments against one or more very senior Bush administration officials, perhaps Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr Bush's most influential adviser, or Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who performs the same role for Vice-President Dick Cheney. But not only is the summit of America's political establishment threatened. In his search for the truth, Mr Fitzgerald also sent Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times to jail for 85 days after she refused to reveal her sources for an article she was preparing on the Plame affair.

Among those sources, it emerged, was Mr Libby, a prime architect of the WMD case for war. As a result, America's most famous newspaper has been engulfed in a hurricane of its own. At one level, the tale is fiendishly complicated. But at heart it is very simple. The travails of the Bush White House and The New York Times stem from an issue that will not go away: why America went to war on a falsehood, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. As a profitless and ever-more unpopular conflict has dragged on, the controversy is corroding the entire presidency of George Bush.
rest of the article
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article321694.ece

[acmavm]

1. That was a great piece of writing. I love the Independent.

It sure has a lot more credibility than the NYT.