Those of you who have followed the series know that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the penultimate book. There are clearly many ways in which the saga can proceed to its conclusion and there are heated discussions as to the various ways that the story could end. I myself have had a series of discussions with people where we compared our various predictions of where the stories would go. The people I was arguing with had carefully read all the books and had noted all kinds of details, which they insisted were hints at the author’s intention. Since I am told that J. K. Rowling had mapped out the entire plot line in advance, these hints had to be taken seriously.

Since I had read only two of the six books (but have seen all three films) I was at a bit of a disadvantage arguing with these Potter mavens, and they were clearly amused by my temerity in advancing theories without having all the facts. Nevertheless I had my own strong views of how I thought the story would end and I stuck to my guns in the face of their clearly better-informed arguments.

But I started wondering why so many of us are so absorbed in trying to predict the end of the Potter story. It is after all, a work of fiction that has no real importance. But it captivates people. Even in one of the serious political websites that I read, the author of a posting, just in passing, posed a simple question about the ending of book six and what it implied for the future, and immediately there were a huge number of comments with people passionately advancing all kinds of theories and explanations.

Clearly many people are attracted to puzzles such as these and it struck me as a possible explanation for why the Karl Rove-Valerie Plame story has achieved such staying power in the media.

(A detailed time line of the events can be found here but here is a quick recap for those of you who have somehow managed to avoid this story. On July 6, 2003, former ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed saying that in February 2002 he had been sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate the claim that Saddam Hussein’s government had tried to purchase ‘yellowcake’ uranium, presumably as part of a weapons program. He could find no evidence of such efforts and had reported this. He said he had then been surprised by the famous ‘sixteen words’ in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address (““The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”) which he felt implied something that was opposite to what he had found and reported. As a result, he wrote the op-ed. The very next week, newspaper columnist Robert Novak wrote that he had been informed by unidentified administration sources that Wilson had been suggested for this mission by his wife Valerie Plame, who worked for the CIA. That was when events escalated because revealing the identity of a covert CIA employee is a crime. There is now a full-scale investigation before a grand jury empanelled by a special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald who has been working since December 2003 on the case, and much of the speculation about the sources of this leak centers on the President’s close advisor Karl Rove and the Vice President’s chief of staff ‘Scooter’ Libby.)

The media have been all over this story and their doggedness bemuses me a little when I think of all the far more serious stories that they glossed over. After all, the attack on Iraq was from the beginning based on false premises that could have been uncovered and exposed if the media had approached that task with anything close to the thoroughness with which they are acting in the Valerie Plame case. The war has resulted in the deaths of about a hundred thousand Iraqis, untold numbers injured, nearly two thousand US soldiers dead and about ten thousand injured, Iraq in ruins with its infrastructure shattered, the US undermining its own armed forces, spending money it cannot afford, and still there is no good solution or end in sight. All this might have been avoided if the media had not given this administration a free pass in selling this war by letting all kinds of misleading statements to be made and left unchallenged, and allowed the country to be raised to a fever pitch of fear. (See this week’s Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World cartoon here.)

So why this media doggedness with respect to the relatively minor Plame revelations? (I am not saying that revealing the identity of a CIA agent is not important, just making a comparison with all the other shenanigans going on right now.) Reporters are examining documents closely, parsing words and sentences, creating timelines, comparing different statements for possible contradictions, poring over evidence, questioning motives, digging for information, not taking things at face value, aggressively challenging the White House Press Secretary’s statements, and so on. Very little of this was done when the significantly more important question of war was involved. Then the press dutifully repeated what the administration told them, acting like stenographers and mouthpieces and cheerleaders rather than reporters. No one was more guilty of this kind of behavior than Judith Miller of the New York Times who has been jailed by the special prosecutor for contempt, possibly because she is protecting the administration sources that fed her false information about Iraq and its purported weapons of mass destruction, and which she dutifully ‘reported’ as part of the effort to create war frenzy. Sam Smith in an essay titled How Journalism Went Bad on his website Progressive Review traces some reasons for the decline in journalism.

I think the reason for the interest in the Valerie Plame-Karl Rove story is the same as that causing the Harry Potter interest. People like puzzles that clearly have a solution, where there are tantalizing clues, where there is a paper trail, and, most importantly, where the consequences are not that serious. After all, in the Plame affair, nobody is going to die and the government is not going to collapse. At the worst, some minor official will resign or go to prison for a short time for perjury or revealing classified information. This makes the whole exercise a game, like playing Clue, and it becomes a race to see who first solves the puzzle correctly. Reporters love this kind of thing.

Serious matters like starting an unprovoked war against another country on false pretences, however, involve high crimes and misdemeanors and are grounds for impeachment and the basis for trials of war crimes. Reporters are not going to go anywhere near that kind of thing out of fear for what they might uncover.

It sometimes does happen, like in the case of Watergate, that what starts out as a simple and small and intriguing puzzle (which was what the initial Watergate investigation was) could end up unraveling the whole fabric of the government. But I think that there is no chance of that happening in this case. The really big scandal associated with the Plame affair, that the country was taken into a catastrophic war on false pretences, is by now well established and there seems to be no huge public outcry. So the Plame affair is likely to stay an intriguing puzzle that can be enjoyed by everyone who is not too preoccupied with speculating about the end of the Harry Potter saga.

POST SCRIPT

The London bombings have raised again the issue of whether security forces should randomly search people or use profiles for targeted searches. Tim Wise argues in The Faulty Logic of “Terrorist” Profiling why profiling will not help.