The War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal statute set forth at 18 U.S.C. § 2441, makes it a federal crime for any U.S. national, whether military or civilian, to violate the Geneva Convention by engaging in murder, torture, or inhuman treatment.

The statute applies not only to those who carry out the acts, but also to those who ORDER IT, know about it, or fail to take steps to stop it. The statute applies to everyone, no matter how high and mighty.

18 U.S.C. § 2441 has no statute of limitations, which means that a war crimes complaint can be filed at any time.

The penalty may be life imprisonment or — if a single prisoner dies due to torture — death. Given that there are numerous, documented cases of prisoners being tortured to death by U.S. soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan (see for example this report), that means that the death penalty would be appropriate for anyone found guilty of carrying out, ordering, or sanctioning such conduct.

The general in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq stated this week that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top administration officials ORDERED that inhuman treatment and torture be conducted as part of a deliberate strategy. This confirms what the Pullitzer prize-winning reporter who uncovered the Iraq prison torture scandal and the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam previously wrote.

Indeed, an FBI email declassified in December 2004 states that Bush signed an Executive Order authorizing torture (here is the list of documents obtained through a freedom of information act request, and take a close look, for example, at this one, which mentions the “executive order”).

An expert on Constitutional law said that only Bush could have authorized the torture which has occurred.

It has also recently come out that, even after the torture at Abu Ghraib hit the news, torture still continues at that prison and, indeed, the U.S. is still torturing people worldwide. Even to the casual observer, it is obvious that the administration has no plans to stop, but has instead been working tirelessly to make it easier to carry out torture in the future.

Let’s recap. We now know that torture in Iraq was ordered by top officials, and that torture is continuing, notwithstanding the administration’s claims that it was only “a couple of bad apples” that were responsible for Abu Ghraib. Making a potential prosecutor’s job easier, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wrote a memo in January 2002 to President Bush saying that America should opt out of the Geneva Convention because top officials have to worry about prosecutions under 18 U.S.C. § 2441. By attempting to sidestep the Geneva Convention, Gonzales created a document trail that can be used to prove that top administration officials knowingly created a policy of torturing prisoners, and that such a policy could reasonably have been expected to result in the death of some prisoners.

The U.S. did opt out of the Geneva Convention for the Afghanistan war, but we never opted out of the Geneva Convention for Iraq. Indeed, President Bush has repeatedly stated that Geneva applies in Iraq (although he has since claimed that foreign fighters captured in Iraq are not covered). Thus, there would be very little room for fancy footwork by defense lawyers in a prosecution against top officials concerning torture in Iraq.

And to the extent that claims that the U.S. has sent prisoners to other countries for the express purpose of being tortured are true, violation of the war crimes act by the highest officials of our country would be even clearer. For who else but Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and other top officials would have the ability to authorize such flights? How could such a program be undertaken without their knowledge? And how could such a program be anything but the intentional “ordering” of torture, or at least “knowing about it” and “failing to take steps to stop it”?

The Abu Ghraib general’s recent statements about torture coming from the top and the existence of the “ghost flights” are important pieces of evidence for convicting Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and a host of other top administration officials for violation of the War Crimes Act of 1996. Upon conviction, they could be sentenced to life in prison, or even death.

Additionally, violation of the war crimes act almost certainly constitutes a “high crime or misdemeanor” which would allow impeachment of such officials.

Postscript: Since this essay was written, new information has come out about torture and other potential violations of the Geneva Convention. The former director of the CIA accused Cheney of overseeing torture policies. Colin Powell’s former chief of staff stated that Dick Cheney is guilty of war crimes. Some of the torturers themselves have come forward to confess their actions (see also this article; see also this article, this one, this one, and finally this one). Of course, the U.S. has now admitted waterboarding, and admitted that it is illegal.

It was also revealed that the U.S. is holding prisoners at gulags in Europe.

In addition, before attacking Falluja, the marines allegedly stopped men “of fighting age” from leaving. The marines also levelled thousands of buildings, illegally denied access to the Iraqi Red Crescent and, according to the UN’s special rapporteur, used “hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population”.

And the U.S. military’s use of white phosphorus and also napalm as weapons in Iraq has been exposed (see also this essay).

These facts further strengthen the case that high level officials committed war crimes. Indeed, even the lawyers and other people who aided in the effort may be war criminals; see also this article , this one, and this press release.

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The documents currently being released by the Justice Department that demonstrate the Bush administration’s view of the president’s constitutional power in a “state of war” tell us things we suspected but didn’t want to know.

The first seven of these official memorandums issued last week dealt with claimed presidential powers to unilaterally abrogate international treaties; suspend constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and press; and order warrant-less searches, wiretaps and seizures of documents and indefinite imprisonment inside the U.S. without trial or criminal charges. The memorandums claimed that Congress has no overriding authority in these matters.

The authors of all but one of these documents were John Yoo and Jay Bybee (both then of the Justice Department but now, respectively, a member of the University of California at Berkeley Law School faculty and a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals). They were also the authors early in the Bush administration of two special memorandums defining torture much more narrowly than in the United States code of military justice or U.S. civil law.

They redefined torture to permit what ordinarily is illegal in U.S. military and civil law under the so-called Federal Maiming Statute. This law makes it a crime to disfigure faces and body parts with knives or razors, or to cause blindness, or cut out tongues, or perform other grotesque and gruesome tortures that this column will leave to the consciences of professor Yoo, Judge Bybee and the senior members of the Bush administration who wished to be advised on their exemption from such legal limits.

Professor Yoo’s view is that the president possesses unchecked authority “in a state of armed conflict.” At the time, this state of armed conflict consisted of a dozen or so stateless persons who had deliberately crashed aircraft into New York and Washington buildings. The two initial memos on torture were withdrawn when they became public.

The American use of torture has been public knowledge or surmise since very early in President Bush’s war on terror. Not many Americans seemed to take note or to protest at the time. There were individuals who protested; the American Civil Liberties Union was on the job, as were Amnesty International and other American nongovernmental organizations and citizens’ groups. They were mostly ignored. Questions were asked in Congress, but little ensued.

This was the amazing thing, really. Very few people among the American public seemed to care—except Fox television executives, who recognize a commercial opportunity when it hits them between the eyes.

Fox began a drama in which each program was devoted to the American president’s torturer doing whatever had to be done to thwart a new threat to the American republic. The hero would apply one of the tortures pronounced legally OK for Americans to use, until the terrorist, gasping or screaming, blurts out where the nuclear bomb has been planted.

This turned out to be one of the most popular programs on the air. It seems that President Bush himself watched. People in the torturing business joked that they got some good ideas from the program.

What if 65 years ago in Germany entertainment radio had broadcast a popular program in which SS and Gestapo officers tortured American OSS officers, or captured American or British airmen, to extract vital information from them at any cost? Adolf Hitler himself might have tuned in. He had decreed that Allied commandos in military uniform should be treated as terrorists rather than as soldiers.

The final thing I will say about this is that many or most of the documents now being issued on how President Bush might ignore the U.S. Constitution had to do with domestic surveillance and the (illegal) use of American military forces against the American public.

That probably would have begun in a small way. “Troublemakers” disappearing here and there. Protest groups rounded up and sent to camps. Possibly a day would have come when some conference of lawyers, or the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, or Americans for Democratic Action, or the Cato Institute, or some political pressure group like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, did something that seriously annoyed the White House.

If a battalion of military police took over the hall and the participants “disappeared,” it would certainly have made the newspapers, if the newspapers still reported such things. But considering the precedent of the American popular reaction to torture, what else would have happened? Possibly there would have been a popular new television program about the subversive forces at work in America, and how patriots should deal with them.

Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.

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The former prosecutor’s assessment was echoed in some respect by United Nations More..General Assembly chief Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, who said America’s military occupation of Iraq has caused over a million deaths and should be probed by the United Nations.

“David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University, said the principle of law used to issue an arrest warrant for [Sudanese President] Omar al-Bashir could extend to former US President Bush over claims officials from his Administration may have engaged in torture by using coercive interrogation techniques on terror suspects,” reported the New Zealand Herald.

The indictment of Bashir was a landmark, said Crane, because it paved a route for the court at The Hague to pursue heads of states engaged in criminality.

“Crane also said that the [Bashir] indictment may even be extended to the former president George W. Bush, on the grounds that some officials in terms of his administration engaged in harsh interrogation techniques on terror suspects which mostly amounted to torture,” said Turkish Weekly.

“All pretended justifications notwithstanding, the aggressions against Iraq and Afghanistan and their occupations constitute atrocities that must be condemned and repudiated by all who believe in the rule of law in international relations,” Brockmann told the Human Rights Council. “The illegality of the use of force against Iraq cannot be doubted as it runs contrary to the prohibition of the use of force in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. It sets a number of precedents that we cannot allow to stand.”

The Bush administration boycotted the Human Rights Council. The day Brockmann made his accusations happened to be the first in which the United States had observers at the council, on orders from President Obama.

According to Iranian news network PressTV, the Iranian government called the Bashir indictment “a blow to International justice” and an “insult directed at Muslims.”

Iran’s plainly stated sentiment toward the court’s legitimacy is similar in spirit to that of the United States. Because the US Government has refused to recognize the court by becoming a signatory in its statute, “the only other way Bush could be investigated is if the [UN] Security Council were to order it, something unlikely to happen with Washington a veto-wielding permanent member,” said the Herald.

Due to the International Criminal Court’s lack of any real police force, it has traditionally relied upon signatory states for enforcement of its rulings. But when the leader of one such state is indicted, the court’s authority and enforcement capability is called into question. Even the arrest of Bashir is a far cry, for now. And without a UN Security Council order, former US President Bush would not go on “trial” before the court any time soon.

However, on January 26, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak insisted that the pursuit of Bush and members of his administration for the torture of terror war prisoners is crucial if justice is to be served.

Nowak added that he believes enough evidence exists currently to proceed with the prosecution of Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense who was credited as being highly influential in the crafting and push for America’s invasion of Iraq and the prior administration’s abusive interrogation tactics.

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Statement on Prosecution of Former High Officials

We urge Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a non-partisan independent Special Counsel to immediately commence a prosecutorial investigation into the most serious alleged crimes of former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Richard B. Cheney, the attorneys formerly employed by the Department of Justice whose memos sought to justify torture, and other former top officials of the Bush Administration.

Our laws, and treaties that under Article VI of our Constitution are the supreme law of the land, require the prosecution of crimes that strong evidence suggests these individuals have committed. Both the former president and the former vice president have confessed to authorizing a torture procedure that is illegal under our law and treaty obligations. The former president has confessed to violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

We see no need for these prosecutions to be extraordinarily lengthy or costly, and no need to wait for the recommendations of a panel or “truth” commission when substantial evidence of the crimes is already in the public domain. We believe the most effective investigation can be conducted by a prosecutor, and we believe such an investigation should begin immediately.

DRAFTED BY The Robert Jackson Steering Committee, SIGNED BY the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, the Society of American Law Teachers, Human Rights USA, After Downing Street, American Freedom Campaign, and a total of 142 organizations listed at http://prosecutebushcheney.org

NANCY PELOSI agrees: “Senator Leahy has a proposal, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is a good idea. What I have some concern about though is it has immunity. And I think that some of the issues involved here, like the services part, politicizing of the Justice Department, and the rest, they have criminal ramifications, and I don’t think we should be giving them immunity. … No one is above the law. The president has said that. [ ... you would support a referral for a criminal investigation, potential prosecution?] Absolutely. No one is above the law.” — Feb. 25, 2009.

JERROLD NADLER agrees: “We have no choice. We must prosecute.” — Feb. 18, 2009.

JACK REED agrees: “I think we have to seriously investigate allegations of torture. I don’t know if we require a formal new Commission to do that. We have the DOJ. We have Federal attorneys. But we cannot simply ignore credible allegations.” — Feb. 12, 2009.

RUSS FEINGOLD agrees: “As President Obama and Attorney General Holder have said, nobody is above the law. There needs to be accountability for wrongdoing by the Bush Administration, including the illegal warrantless wiretapping and interrogation programs. We cannot simply sweep these assaults on the rule of law under the rug.” — Feb. 10, 2009.

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE agrees: “Whitehouse said the Justice Department should probe the matter. He pointed out that the agency has long regarded waterboarding as torture and, back in the 1980s, prosecuted a Texas sheriff in the 1980s for using waterboarding to extract confessions from suspects. Simply fixing the law around a policy does not make it legal, Whitehouse added. — February 2009, http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/39495

ANTONIO TAGUBA agrees: “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.” — February 2009.

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE agree: criminal investigation 38% independent panel 24% neither 34% USA Today / Gallup Jan 30 – Feb 1, 2009.

THE NINTH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS agrees: On Feb. 27, 2009, it rejected an attempt by the Obama administration to use the state secrets privilege to block a lawsuit concerning the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program.

TORTURERS’ OWN LAWYERS agree: “Once Holder said that [waterboarding is torture] I got nervous,” said one lawyer who represents a CIA official involved in the interrogation program, who asked not to be identified talking about a legally sensitive matter. “If he says it was torture, he has to do something.” — Newsweek, January 2009.

JOHN CONYERS agrees: “The new administration should conduct an independent criminal probe into whether any laws were broken in connection with these activities. Just this week, in the pages of this newspaper, a Guantanamo Bay official acknowledged that a suspect there had been “tortured” — her exact word — in apparent violation of the law. The law is the law, and, if criminal conduct occurred, those responsible — particularly those who ordered and approved the violations — must be held accountable.” — Jan. 23, 2009.

CARL LEVIN agrees: “I suggested to Eric Holder … that he select some people or hire an outside person who’s got real credibility, perhaps a retired federal judge, to take all the available information, and there’s reams of it. Look, the Vice President, the former Vice President of the United States, acknowledged that they engaged in torture. He says that waterboarding’s not torture, he’s wrong. Waterboarding is torture, period. And this administration and Eric Holder has said so. It’s torture and there’s other forms that they engaged in, so what needs to be done, I believe, in addition to finishing the investigation, is for the Attorney General, the new Attorney General, to identify some people in his office to take the existing documentation. The acknowledgment, folks, this is not a very difficult — this is almost like a case in court with an agreed upon statement of facts, that the previous administration acknowledges that they engaged in waterboarding, period.” — Jan. 22, 2009.

MANFRED NOWAK agrees: The incoming American President Barack Obama is legally obligated to prosecute Bush and Rumsfeld because the US has ratified the UN Convention on Torture and has also recognized it as legally binding, said UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak. — Jan. 20, 2009.

ERIC HOLDER agrees: At Holder’s confirmation hearing, when Senator Patrick Leahy asked if waterboarding is torture and illegal, Holder agreed that it is. When Leahy then asked whether the President of the United States can immunize acts of torture, Holder said that he cannot. When Senator Diane Feinstein said that an Inspector General’s report on politicized hiring, firing, and prosecuting at the Department of Justice is evidence that officials have lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and that doing so is illegal, Holder replied that he will review prosecutors’ determination not to pursue criminal charges. When Senator Orrin Hatch asked if the president has the authority to engage in warrantless surveillance, Holder said no. When Senator Russ Feingold asked the same thing, Holder stammered and stuttered and called it a “hypothetical” but said no. When Feingold pointed out that lawyers at the Department of Justice, the White House, and the Office of the Vice President had written memos that clearly sought to sanction illegal actions, and asked “What is your view of the President’s Constitutional authority to authorize violations of the law?” Holder replied that the president does not have that authority.

56 MEMBERS OF CONGRESS agree: “Dear Mr. Attorney General: “We are writing to request that you appoint a special counsel to investigate whether the Bush Administration’s policies regarding the interrogation of detainees have violated federal criminal laws. There is mounting evidence that the Bush Administration has sanctioned enhanced interrogation techniques against detainees under the control of the United States that warrant an investigation.” — June 6, 2008, http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/39727

DICK DURBIN agrees: On February 12, 2008, Senators Durbin and Whitehouse wrote a letter to the Department of Justice requesting an investigation into the role “Justice Department officials [played] in authorizing and/or overseeing the use of waterboarding by the Central Intelligence Agency… and whether those who authorized it violated the law.” The two senators wrote: “Waterboarding has a sordid history in the annals of torture by repressive regimes, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Khmer Rouge. The United States has always repudiated waterboarding as a form of torture and prosecuted it as a war crime.”

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The Preliminary Memorandum identifies 31 culprits and details the war crimes they committed, the laws they broke, and the many fulsome warnings they received regarding their actions from numerous governmental lawyers and officials high and low, including the Judge Advocate Generals of all the armed services. The culprits who should be prosecuted include Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Addington, Tenet, Bybee, Yoo, Haynes, Chertoff and others.

The Preliminary Memorandum calls the Bush administration’s illegal acts “an attempted constitutional revolution that succeeded for years.” It began six days after 9/11, when Bush secretly gave the CIA permission to “murder . . . people all over the world.” It continued in a series of secret, wholly specious legal memos authorizing torture, electronic eavesdropping, wholesale violations of law, and Presidential usurpation of the role of Congress.

Public pressure eventually forced the administration to declassify a few of the memos. These purported to authorize war crimes outlawed by the Geneva Conventions and U.S. anti-torture laws. Among them was John Yoo’s infamous “torture memo” defining torture as “requiring the pain associated with organ failure or death,” saying torture supposedly couldn’t exist if the torturer wanted information, and urging that the President could do anything he wanted, including paying no attention whatever to Congressional laws. Meanwhile, Bush administration officials and lawyers ignored extensive warnings given them by government officials that they were engaging in criminal acts; the warnings were given both orally and in extensive memos.

http://afterdowningstreet.org/robertjackson

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Staff Sgt. Alejandro Campos, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, became a citizen after joining the Army.

Immigrants who are permanent residents, with documents commonly known as green cards, have long been eligible to enlist. But the new effort, for the first time since the Vietnam War, will open the armed forces to temporary immigrants if they have lived in the United States for a minimum of two years, according to military officials familiar with the plan.

Recruiters expect that the temporary immigrants will have more education, foreign language skills and professional expertise than many Americans who enlist, helping the military to fill shortages in medical care, language interpretation and field intelligence analysis.

“The American Army finds itself in a lot of different countries where cultural awareness is critical,” said Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, the top recruitment officer for the Army, which is leading the pilot program. “There will be some very talented folks in this group.”

The program will begin small — limited to 1,000 enlistees nationwide in its first year, most for the Army and some for other branches. If the pilot program succeeds as Pentagon officials anticipate, it will expand for all branches of the military. For the Army, it could eventually provide as many as 14,000 volunteers a year, or about one in six recruits.

About 8,000 permanent immigrants with green cards join the armed forces annually, the Pentagon reports, and about 29,000 foreign-born people currently serving are not American citizens.

Although the Pentagon has had wartime authority to recruit immigrants since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, military officials have moved cautiously to lay the legal groundwork for the temporary immigrant program to avoid controversy within the ranks and among veterans over the prospect of large numbers of immigrants in the armed forces.

A preliminary Pentagon announcement of the program last year drew a stream of angry comments from officers and veterans on Military.com, a Web site they frequent.

Marty Justis, executive director of the national headquarters of the American Legion, the veterans’ organization, said that while the group opposes “any great influx of immigrants” to the United States, it would not object to recruiting temporary immigrants as long as they passed tough background checks. But he said the immigrants’ allegiance to the United States “must take precedence over and above any ties they may have with their native country.”

The military does not allow illegal immigrants to enlist, and that policy would not change, officers said. Recruiting officials pointed out that volunteers with temporary visas would have already passed a security screening and would have shown that they had no criminal record.

“The Army will gain in its strength in human capital,” General Freakley said, “and the immigrants will gain their citizenship and get on a ramp to the American dream.”

In recent years, as American forces faced combat in two wars and recruiters struggled to meet their goals for the all-volunteer military, thousands of legal immigrants with temporary visas who tried to enlist were turned away because they lacked permanent green cards, recruiting officers said.

Recruiters’ work became easier in the last few months as unemployment soared and more Americans sought to join the military. But the Pentagon, facing a new deployment of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, still has difficulties in attracting doctors, specialized nurses and language experts.

Several types of temporary work visas require college or advanced degrees or professional expertise, and immigrants who are working as doctors and nurses in the United States have already been certified by American medical boards.

Military figures show that only 82 percent of about 80,000 Army recruits last year had high school diplomas. According to new figures, the Army provided waivers to 18 percent of active-duty recruits in the final four months of last year, allowing them to enlist despite medical conditions or criminal records.

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The death last week of W. Mark Felt — Bob Woodward’s secret source, indelibly dubbed “Deep Throat,” who played such a crucial role in this newspaper’s Watergate reporting — coincided with the appearance of Richard M. Nixon, as played by Frank Langella, on local movie screens. As I watched Langella’s Nixon being interrogated about the conspiracy and coverup by Michael Sheen’s David Frost in “Frost/Nixon,” I relived strong memories. And Felt’s death raised the inevitable question: Could the kind of reporting that Woodward and Carl Bernstein pulled off be done today, more than three decades later, in the age of the Internet?

For many reasons, I believe it could. But it would probably play out quite differently.

There are still whistle-blowers like Felt in government today — probably many more than there were back then. They are encouraged by various public employees’ organizations and protected by whistle-blowers’ legislation enacted after Watergate. And they have many more investigative reporters to talk to — not only at newspapers, despite deep and worrying cuts in newsroom staffs, but also many other media outlets, including investigative Web sites and blogs.

Numerous confidential government and other insider sources have helped Washington Post reporters with investigative stories in recent years, about everything from the CIA’s secret interrogation sites for terrorist suspects to mismanagement at the Smithsonian Institution. Unnamed whistle-blowers assisted many news organizations, led by Joshua Micah Marshall’s investigative blog, Talking Points Memo, in uncovering a pattern of Justice Department firings of U.S. attorneys across the country for apparently political reasons.

Just as it was with Mark Felt and other confidential sources used by Woodward and Bernstein in their Watergate reporting, few of these officials simply seek out journalists and spill all the beans. They usually have to be painstakingly pursued and wooed, and they often are wary of providing more than snippets of information that must be pieced together over time from numerous sources for the most explosive stories. Still, it happens every day in Washington, during every administration.

But two young local reporters chasing hunches and scraps of information about a criminal conspiracy involving the highest officials in government, including the president? Could that really happen again?

There’s no reason why not, even though so much has changed since 1972. New technology actually makes investigative reporting somewhat easier. We can now use computers and the Internet to search records and other information, and we can use pre-paid cell phones for conversations with confidential sources. Of course, an administration under siege would also have more sophisticated resources for investigating leaks and marshaling counter-attacks in the news media and the blogosphere.

Reporters working today on a story such as Watergate would be unlikely to be left relatively alone, along with their sources, for as long as Bob and Carl were. Now, from day one, the story would be all over the Internet, and hordes of reporters and bloggers would immediately join the chase. The story would become fodder for around-the-clock argument among the blowhards on cable television and the Internet. Opinion polls would be constantly stirring up and measuring the public’s reaction.

So the conspiracy and the cover-up would unravel much more quickly — and their political impact would probably be felt much sooner. Nixon was re-elected five months after the burglary in 1972, and Watergate was not much of an issue during the campaign. That would not happen today.

In an age when the media have been turned upside-down by the biggest shifts in audiences and economic models since the advent of television, my two biggest questions about whether we could still pursue a story like Watergate center on resources and verification. Many Americans, including opinion leaders in Washington and elsewhere, simply didn’t or wouldn’t believe The Washington Post’s reporting about Watergate during its early months — not until we were joined by the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS News, Judge John J. Sirica, the Senate Watergate committee and the special Watergate prosecutor.

In today’s cacophonous media world, in which news, rumor, opinion and infotainment from every kind of source are jumbled together and often presented indiscriminately, how would such an improbable-sounding story ever get verified?

As newsrooms rapidly shrink, will they still have the resources, steadily amassed by newspapers since Watergate, for investigative reporting that takes months and even years of sustained work.

These questions are not just about holding presidents accountable to the American people, as vital as that is. The answers could affect anyone whose conditions could be helped by great journalism, such as the wounded Iraq veterans whose care at Walter Reed Hospital has been greatly improved because of investigative reporting by Dana Priest and Anne Hull in this newspaper.

Despite the fame that came to Woodward and Bernstein after the book and movie “All the President’s Men,” these questions aren’t about the greater glory of journalists either. In fact, Woodward, Bernstein and The Post were under almost constant attack during the early days of Watergate. Near the end of “Frost/Nixon,” when Langella’s Nixon refers to those “sons of whores” in the news media, a friend turned to me and whispered, “He’s talking about you.” I played only a supporting role in editing some of our Watergate coverage, but even after all these years, that still felt good.

Leonard Downie Jr. was executive editor of The Washington Post for 17 years. His novel, “The Rules of the Game,” will be published next month.

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