Would Richard Nixon have publicized a fatwa against two obscure and powerless...

[Boojatta]

people named Salman Woodward and Carl Rushdie or would Nixon have simply sent out an assassin to "take care" of them?

CHOMSKY: (...)there are cases where the press has stood up against a segment of power. In fact, the one you mentioned -- Woodward and Bernstein helped topple a president -- is the example that the media and everyone else constantly uses to show that the press is adversarial.

But there are very serious problems with that case that have been pointed out over and over again. In fact, what the example actually shows is the subordination of the media to power. And you can see that very clearly as soon as you take a look at the Watergate affair. What was the charge against Richard Nixon, after all? The charge against Nixon was that he attacked people with power -- he sent a gang of petty criminals for some still unknown purpose to burglarize the Democratic party headquarters. (...) You don't attack real power, because people in power can defend themselves. We can easily demonstrate that that's exactly what was involved; in fact, history was kind enough to set up a controlled experiment for us. At the very moment of the Watergate exposures, there was also another set of exposures: namely, the FBI COINTELPRO operations which were exposed using the Freedom of Information Act right at the same time. Those were infinitely more serious than the Watergate caper. (...) The exposures began with the Kennedy administration -- in fact earlier, but primarily with the Kennedy administration -- and ran right through the Nixon administration. What was exposed was extremely serious -- far worse than anything in Watergate. For example, it included political assassination, instigation of ghetto riots, a long series of burglaries and harassment against a legal political party (...) which, unlike the Democratic party, is not powerful and did not have the capacity to defend itself. (...)

So what we can look at is how the media responded to these two exposures: (...) The Watergate affair became a major issue, shaking the foundations of the republic. The COINTELPRO exposures are known only to a handful of people; the press wasn't interested in it. And that tells you exactly what was involved in Watergate: people with power can defend themselves, and the media will support people with power. Nothing else is involved.

From:
Bewildering the Herd
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Rick Szykowny, 1990>

How would Nixon have gotten their real names if they had used pen names?

His Secretary of State might have said that authors writing about political matters need to disclose their real names because otherwise society moves "a step away from open government."

A thread on DU involving another attempted application of the same principle