...Or the courts.
The NYTimes tries to assert ethical authority. (and shows a little backbone in the process).
The waivers The prosecutor produced what he claimed were waivers of confidentiality signed by White House officials, and his supporters have asked how Miller or any other journalists could remain silent if the presumed sources say they are free to talk. In fact, these documents were extracted by coercion, so they are meaningless. Employees who are told they are required to sign waivers to keep their jobs are not sincerely freeing reporters from promises to keep their identities secret.
In a situation like this, it's not possible for politicians, prosecutors, judges or other journalists to parse a confidentiality agreement from the outside. The reporter, and the editors who are the writer's immediate supervisors, are the only ones who truly understand the nuances of the case. More broadly, it is up to the source, not the reporter, to speak out. If Rove or any other officials involved were really concerned about getting out the truth, all they would need to do would be to stand up in public and tell it.
A jar of red herrings The New York Times WEDNESDAY, JULY 20, 2005
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/07/19/opinion/edrove.php
It is getting hard to keep track of all the issues stirred up by the leaking of a CIA operative's name to a conservative columnist two years ago. Our colleague Judith Miller has been in jail for nearly two weeks for refusing to identify her confidential sources to a grand jury investigating that leak. Her position - that reporters cannot do their jobs if they cannot guarantee some sources anonymity - is very clear. But the case itself is complicated, and it's been made more so by a raft of distracting issues.
Let's talk about a few of those:
Protection for sources Not all confidential sources are noble. Sometimes, they are government officials hoping to embarrass their political opponents or promote an agenda. In the leak case, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine has said that Karl Rove, George W. Bush's top political adviser, was the one who told him that a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, who had written a New York Times Op-Ed article that upset the Bush administration, was married to someone who worked for the CIA. Cooper said he'd also discussed the matter with Lewis Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. Bob Novak, the columnist who actually identified Wilson's wife - by her maiden name, Valerie Plame - has said only that his sources were in the government.
Miller never wrote an article mentioning Ms. Wilson, and she has obviously not identified the person she talked to about the matter. But the hard truth is that no reporter can choose the circumstances for upholding a principle. It doesn't matter whether we think a source is a good person or has good motivations. A reporter promises confidentiality, and the paper backs up the journalist because otherwise the public will not learn what it needs to know. It's up to the reporter and editor to determine whether information given under a promise of confidentiality is reliable. But reporters cannot apply ideology when protecting their sources, any more than civil liberties lawyers can defend the First Amendment rights of only the people they agree with.
The waivers The prosecutor produced what he claimed were waivers of confidentiality signed by White House officials, and his supporters have asked how Miller or any other journalists could remain silent if the presumed sources say they are free to talk. In fact, these documents were extracted by coercion, so they are meaningless. Employees who are told they are required to sign waivers to keep their jobs are not sincerely freeing reporters from promises to keep their identities secret.
In a situation like this, it's not possible for politicians, prosecutors, judges or other journalists to parse a confidentiality agreement from the outside. The reporter, and the editors who are the writer's immediate supervisors, are the only ones who truly understand the nuances of the case. More broadly, it is up to the source, not the reporter, to speak out. If Rove or any other officials involved were really concerned about getting out the truth, all they would need to do would be to stand up in public and tell it.
Joseph Wilson's report This is one of the biggest red herrings in this case - that administration officials were simply trying to wave reporters off an erroneous story on this report.
In July 2003, Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article describing how he had been sent by the CIA to investigate a report that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. He said he had found no evidence to support the claim of a uranium purchase, or even a serious attempt to negotiate one, and that he had reported this to Washington. That is entirely accurate. Rove knew it when he spoke to Cooper, and he tried to give the impression that Wilson was an unreliable person who had been sent to Niger only because of his wife's influence. In fact, Wilson had excellent credentials, and the entire Niger story had already been pretty thoroughly debunked by the time Cooper and Rove spoke.
What really bothered Rove was Wilson's view that the administration had deliberately twisted the intelligence on Iraq and that Bush had misled Americans about the need for war. We don't know whether top officials heard about Wilson's findings and ignored them, or whether the findings never reached the upper levels - at the time, dissenting views on Iraq were not getting much of an airing in the administration. There's a lot we don't know about this case. But these things are clear:
Journalists should not tailor their principles to the politics of the moment.
Coerced waivers of confidentiality are meaningless.
Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.