As the country waits for the verdict in the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof was able to offer an insider's perspective on the highly-publicized proceedings. Though best known for his crusade against the genocide in Darfur, Kristof is also outspoken about his longstanding opposition to the war in Iraq. "I wrote my first column in opposition to war in 2002. I then visited Iraq six months before the war started, and that cemented my conviction that war was a bad idea," he told the Daily before his speech yesterday. On May 6, 2003, at a time when the initial invasion had ended in success and when the Bush administration was experiencing high approval ratings, Kristof wrote a column that referenced U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson's allegations that the government overstated its case that Iraq had tried to get uranium from Africa. At the time, Kristof withheld Wilson's name but anonymously reported Wilson's charges that important documents had been forged, which he came to believe while in Niger. That column was mentioned in the federal indictment of Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, as one of the factors that allegedly led Libby to investigate Wilson's trip to Niger and to out Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as an undercover CIA agent. In the federal investigation leading up to Libby's indictment, Kristof was one of the many journalists subpoenaed. Kristof's colleague at The New York Times, Judith Miller, was jailed in July 2005 for refusing to disclose the anonymous source who had given her information about Plame. She later obtained permission from Libby to reveal him as her source. Kristof recalls being surprised the Bush administration had not made a vocal response to the article that he published. "Usually, when a journalist writes something bad about a presidential administration, officials call us up to yell at us. But I did not hear a peep from them. They obviously took other routes," he said. According to Kristof, these other routes have jeopardized journalists' ability to gather information through anonymous sources. "It's been a disaster for journalists to protect sources. There are more journalists in jail but less information out there. If this had happened in the past, then the Pentagon Papers and Watergate wouldn't have been the same," he said.
-by Phoenix Tso
