Getting to the bottom of the wrong stories

Slate's Jack Shafer has a Plame update. He notes that if Nixon had had as hard-nosed a justice department investigator as the Plame inquiry's Fitzgerald, than we'd probably never have heard of Woodward and Bernstein.

The Plame case and the Watergate scandal aren't directly analogous, of course, but imagine how efficiently Richard Nixon could have ended the investigation by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein into the break-in and cover-up had his Justice Department had such a legal tool in its black bag. He could have shut down Woodward and Bernstein's investigation by using some allied criminal case as a pretext for subpoenaing them to name their anonymous sources. Neither reporter would have talked, but neither reporter would have been able to do much work from a jail cell. Just hinting that the government was thinking of subpoenaing the two reporters would have dried up their anonymous sources—and their potential anonymous sources.

All of this makes us wonder what would happen if the press put the same type of focus into who was the source of the Niger yellow cake documents -- you know, the ones Bush used to validate his rush to war -- as they do into who provided CBS with allegedly forged documents that merely confirm what we already know about Bush's National Guard (lack of) service?