The Freedom of the Press to be a Conduit for Leaks

There has been a great amount of boo-hooing from members of the press lately regarding subpoenas served to reporters in criminal cases. While I am usually on the side of the press against government regulation, I find many of their arguments hard to swallow.

The most recent case involves blowhard Robert Novak and the criminal investigation into the leak of the identity and occupation of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Can someone please explain to me how we can have five individuals subpoenaed in this case, none of whom is apparently Robert Novak? Newsweek editor Michael Cooper has currently been granted a stay as he appeals a federal court's order to divulge his sources in a story he wrote on the affair, but it appears that he, along with several other reporters in the last year, will feel the sting of a 500 dollar a day fine if he fails to pony up with the names of his "unnamed sources."

When the Plame investigation began, President Bush, in a rare moment of candor, declared that we "may never know" who leaked her name. But it certainly doesn't take a Justice department investigator to realize that the one person who could definitely tell you is, well, Robert Novak. The connecting of one dot to another leads to the obvious conclusion - dot one: revealing the name of an undercover CIA operative is illegal, dot two: Valerie Plame was such an operative, dot three: someone told Robert Novak about it, knowing that it would find its way into print, dot four: Robert Novak is facilitating a criminal enterprise. Don't believe for a nano-second that he is nothing more than a naif, a pawn in the game of someone in the administration. He most certainly knew that such an odd piece of information about such an obscure person who happened to be the wife of a man whom the administration wanted to discredit wasn't dropped into his lap accidentally. It would probably be more accurate to describe him as a co-conspirator, given his history and political leanings.

The other recent case that has been used as evidence of a growing threat to freedom of the press is the case of one-time uber-nuclear-spy now ruined Energy department patsy scapegoat Wen Ho Lee. At one time the airwaves were full of salacious details about his supposed dealings with China and now discredited accusations about his life as an agent trading in the most deadly of our national nuclear secrets. The only problem is that these accusations proved to be false, and of the 59 count indictment handed down, Dr. Lee eventually pled guilty to one charge unrelated to espionage. You might recall at the time that the security at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories had been miserable, and the attention focused on Dr. Lee served as a convenient lightning rod that drew on classic yellow scare rhetoric to deflect legitimate inquiries into the sloppiness of securing American nuclear secrets. Well, it worked - at the expense of destroying a man's life and papering over the important discussion about security at Los Alamos. We've heard nothing since then on the subject - and that's just the way Washington likes it. This week, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson reiterated an order that five reporters who were the conduit for leaked classified information fingering Dr. Lee had to reveal their sources. Once again, the hyberbolic claims that this order and others like it would chill the freedom of the press began to reverberate through editorialspace.

In both of these cases, press advocates are dramatically overstating the case that they need to be able to protect their confidential sources from government prying. These leaks were intentional acts by the government to discredit a whistleblower (Plame) and to scapegoat an individual for institutional failings (Lee.) Allowing government insiders to selectively leak information to wage war on those people who question them and then invoking the first amendment to shield those insiders from investigations is a pretty nifty trick.

This means that those who are declaring these orders as dire threats to press freedom have misplaced their concerns. For example, Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, stated "All this has to do with secrecy. The government is trying to keep more and more secrets all the time, and journalists are working harder to uncover those secrets. Given the terrorism climate, all this has come to a head." What Ms. Dalgish does not see is that the press is being played - used as a lackey by politicians and bureaucrats who need a third party to do their hatchet job for them. This all under the cover of secrecy and backed by facially powerful First Amendment rhetoric and reporters willing to fall on their swords to protect the shadowy figures who are using them. In a way she has it exactly right - "all this has to do with secrecy."

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