On Saturday evening March 1, Daniel Ellsberg was noodling around the Web and happened across a story from the British newspaper The Observer that caught his eye under the tantalizing headline, "Revealed: US Dirty Tricks to Win Vote on Iraq War." The paper's Martin Bright, Ed Vulliamy and Peter Beaumont had obtained a copy of a memo from a National Security Agency (NSA) official outlining U.S. plans to spy on certain United Nations Security Council members to get some insight into their thinking on Iraq and the coming Security Council vote.
Interesting, Ellsberg thought. "So I rushed out the next morning at 5 o'clock to get [The New York Times] to see how they were covering it," he told me. Naturally, he was disappointed. And remains so, because, as I write, the Times has yet to mention the story, which has received only scant coverage elsewhere in the American press.
Meanwhile, it's received far more coverage around the globe. And at the end of last week, the story took an ominous new turn. A British employee of the Government Communications Headquarters (Britain's NSA), a 28-year-old woman, was arrested on suspicion of leaking the memo. The Observer reports now that Tony Blair's government -- with his political future conceivably hanging on what happens at the United Nations in the coming days -- has commenced a search for more leakers and is seeking more arrests. Hence Ellsberg's interest.
"A Pentagon Papers case, essentially, is happening right now in Britain," he says, "around a memo whose revelation could dramatically affect the Security Council's vote. And by and large, Americans don't even know about it."
Critics have said, Big deal; finding out that spying is going on at the United Nations is like finding out that there's gambling at Rick's. And to be sure, there is a long history of bugging and surveillance among the world body's members, a history The Observer itself detailed in a related follow-up story.
Fine. But two points. First, can anyone say with a straight face that this memo isn't an interesting thing? Political strategy has been "going on" for a long time, too, but when a memo outlining one is unearthed -- such as Karl Rove's famous PowerPoint presentation of last year -- it's news. Second, there's reason to believe that the American media's indifference to The Observer story reposes less in the fact that this is a dog-bites-man yawner than in the very reasonable suspicion -- or fear -- among our nation's editors that running this story would set off a firestorm here and would require, in this climate, more spine than most American news outlets are displaying these days.
Right-wing media outlets sure saw the potential for trouble, because after the story broke in England, The Washington Times and the Drudge Report sought immediately to discredit it and prevent it from piquing curiosity here. They cited misspellings that supposedly proved the inauthenticity of the memo, which The Observer posted on its Web site. But it turned out the paper had merely anglicized certain spellings. It re-Americanized them, and those charges melted away. The memo's authenticity has now been verified, Vulliamy says, by everyone from intelligence experts to the journalist and NSA specialist James Bamford. Nevertheless, The Washington Times and Matt Drudge accomplished their mission: Either Martin or Vulliamy had been booked for appearances on NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN, all of which were cancelled.
Once the "it's fake" line of attack was shot down, the gambling-at-Rick's analogy took hold, and it's held firm since. As I say, the argument that such activity is not, strictly speaking, new has merit. But is that really why the American press has shrugged? (Baltimore's Sun, which has given the story continuing coverage, is a notable exception).
Ellsberg posed to me this hypothetical: Suppose The Observer had unearthed a memo showing that Germany or, God forbid, France, had been spying on poor little Cameroon (and four other delegations). Think the Drudge Report might have spun that story a little differently? Would The Washington Times have exercised its sober journalistic skepticism and questioned the authenticity of that memo? How many days in a row would that story have commanded "the wood" (the front page, in tabloid-speak) of The New York Post? The cable shows would have been able to speak of nothing else for a week. And -- this, finally, is the point -- a pro-war vote from the Security Council would have been a done deal.
Just a guess, but I'm betting that The New York Times would have covered that. The Times often gets singled out in these narratives, and in some ways unfairly: It's still the best thing we've got. But it gets singled out because of its unique position of power in American journalism (and maybe in part because of that little motto up there in the upper-left-hand corner of the front page). People have higher expectations of it.
The media critic Norman Solomon interviewed a Times editor about why the paper hadn't mentioned the story. "It's not that we haven't been interested," the editor said. "We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting." Fair enough. But now the authenticity of the memo is beyond question. And now someone has been arrested for allegedly leaking it. Aside from the fact that such an arrest is news in and of itself, it means that the principle of journalism and source protection -- albeit in Britain, not the United States -- is now in play. One might have thought that the newspaper that bravely went to the Supreme Court over the Pentagon Papers would, at that point, take an interest.
Well, as Lou Reed said, those were different times. Now, our media, even our best media, are afraid of the repercussions that might follow a courageous act. And repercussions will continue, certainly in Britain at least, where the Blair government is still investigating. "The Blair crew is known for its aggressive tactics with the media," Vulliamy told me. "Now The Observer's mettle will be tested. We have to resist every effort to cooperate with the investigation and do all we can to protect this defendant."
Ellsberg was scheduled to speak at the National Press Club yesterday, so the story may finally have gained some legs. But what's instructive about this episode is not what will happen now, 10 days after the story broke. It's what didn't happen during those 10 days -- how the right-wing media shot a true story down, and how the bulk of the mainstream press accepted those terms. And we wonder why we're charging off to a war that nearly half the population is against.
Michael Tomasky's columns appear every Wednesday at TAP Online.
