With a Fourth Estate Like This
Who needs a 5th column? Gabriel Schonfeld at the Weekly Standard on a federal subpoena for an NYT scribbler:
Investigations of national-security leaks in Washington are not all that rare. But until Judith Miller of the New York Times was sent to jail for 85 days by a special prosecutor digging into the Valerie Plame imbroglio, investigations of such leaks in which journalists are subpoenaed were about as common as unicorns wandering the National Mall.
We now have another such unicorn. On January 24, a federal grand jury in Alexandria issued a subpoena to James Risen of the New York Times, seeking information about who in the U.S. government provided him with classified information that he published in his book, State of War. That book appeared in January 2006, more than two years ago. The CIA may have a hard time keeping secrets, but the Justice Department, we are learning now that this long-running leak inquest has come to light, seems to be very good at it.
There are at least two possibilities why Risen was issued a subpoena. One is that his book badly embarrassed the CIA by exposing incompetence well beyond its familiar inability to keep secrets. In referring the breach to the Justice Department for investigation, the CIA is paying him back. The subpoena, in other words, is part and parcel of a cover-up of agency bungling.
Another explanation is that, thanks to Risen’s book, valuable intelligence sources and methods were compromised, damage was done to national security, and the Justice Department has been tasked with tracking down the malefactors in the intelligence community who broke their oaths of secrecy, violated the law, and dropped classified information of value to American adversaries into the public domain. Because Risen is the only one who knows their identity, he is being hauled before a grand jury.
Daniel Schorr of NPR is a proponent of the first theory. He sees a CIA “enraged” by the leak of its “colossal failure” and striking back. I would bet the agency’s Farm that he is wrong. And that the second theory is closer to the mark.
… Codebreaking and the interception of electronic transmissions are the crown jewels of American intelligence and guarded as such. Communications intelligence is one of three narrow categories of secrets–along with the identities of intelligence agents and the design of nuclear weapons–protected by a special statute all its own. State of War punctured this blanket of secrecy. And it did so in a way that undoubtedly caused the Iranians, along with other American adversaries, to improve their codes and protect their communications far more carefully. Thus, at a moment when U.S. intelligence was tasked with gaining information about Iranian nuclear weapons–one of our highest national priorities–out came revelations that closed a key American window into the workings of the Iranian government.
…
James Risen is perfectly free to pursue a prize-winning journalistic career built upon promising confidentiality to sources within government. But there is an ancient and essential principle embodied in our democratically enacted laws: the public “has a right to every man’s evidence” when our statutes are trampled upon. The rest of us are thus perfectly free to applaud that Risen is being compelled to testify about a crime that has been committed, a crime in this instance in which he is fully complicit.
The rest here.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:16 am on Saturday, February 9, 2008
One Response to “With a Fourth Estate Like This”
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February 9th, 2008 at 11:41 am
It certainly is a problem all over the place.
Investigative journalists and authors with an agenda of deep sixing a current administration or some aspect of it or simply an agenda of self-aggrandizement…writing exposés and even entire books based on partial information.