New York Times reporter sent to jail in leak case

[jriera]

Free press?

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=2&u=/nm/20050706/ts_nm/media_leak_dc

.... WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A New York Times reporter was jailed on Wednesday after she said she could not break her promise and reveal her confidential source to a grand jury investigating the leak of a covert CIA operative's name to the media. .....

[legion]

So the freedom of press is an absolute right? Even in the face of treason?

Wish my right to own property was so absolute...

[kach22i]

Originally posted by legion
Wish my right to own property was so absolute...

[Jeff Higgins]

One of my pet peeves are public servants speaking to the press "on the condition of anonymity". Public servants, when speaking about public goings on for which they are responsible or for which they have knowledge, need to be held accountable and put their names and faces behind their statements. Reporters that hide said public servants' identities should rot in jail until they reveal them. As far as private sources protecting themselves over private issues; more power to them. I believe that priveledge stops when some one accepts a public service job and speaks about it to the press.

[jriera]

Does two wrongs make a rigth?

- Wrong to publish the name of a CIA operative (don't those names are locked next to the JFK files?)
- Wrong to punish the messenger

[bryanthompson]

If you're in an administration, and you they are doing something that you don't agree with, you don't take the ******* way out and rat to the press anonymously... you quit your job, take a stand, and expose it like a man.

Of course... once that's done, you write a book, maybe make a movie out of it, travel the country giving speeches, then get a tenured position at Harvard.

[Moneyguy1]

easy to say, difficult to do. You would absolutely be surprised about the kinds of retribution the government can dole out. People tend to protect themselves as much as possible. It's only natural.

Further, why should a public sector whistle blower be any different than one in the private sector? Do you really want a repressive government that allows no freedom of speech? Isn't that one of the things we are supposed to be doing in Iraq for the folks over there?

One by one your individual freedoms are disappearing and you don't even seem to notice.

Lest you implode, this ain't a partisan thing. Ever notice when someone rats on an individual of the party you like, they are a traitor and if they rat on the party you hate, they are a hero? Can't have it both ways.

[jyl]

It seems like a tough dilemma. We want reporters to be able to get and report information, including information that the government is hiding from us. But we also want prosecutors to be able to find and prosecute criminals.

After thinking about it, I'd come down on the side of the reporter. Here's my logic.

1. In most cases, a lone reporter has no special ability to get information on a crime, certainly much less ability than does law enforcement with all its tools of surveillance, subpeona, coercion, imprisonment, prosecution, and so on, wielded by tens and even hundreds of agents.

2. Why shouldn't we expect law enforcement to do its job then, and find the information itself, rather than piggy-backing on a reporter's work?

3. There is a special sort of case where the reporter does have special access to information on a crime. That is the case when the the very act of giving information to the reporter is in fact the crime.

4. Now, in these cases, in most cases the person talking to the reporter is trying to expose some act by government. It is usually something that the government is trying to conceal from the public, because they know we'll be angry about it. (You'll notice that governments intentionally leak information to the press all the time, when they want the public to learn the information in a deniable back-door kind of way, and there's almost never a prosecution in those cases. It is only when the government wants to hide the information that they suddenly start taking leaks seriously and call in the prosecutors.)

5. In those cases, prosecuting the reporter and/or the leaker is the government's way of further concealing the information that they don't want us to know about. Is it really in the public interest to help government keep things hidden from us? In most cases, I would say not. In general, I think we should know more, not less, about what the government is doing. Not that I don't trust the government . . . but they do need close watching, all the time.

6. Therefore, I come down on the side of the reporter. I think that in the great majority of cases the crime of leaking information is usually much "less bad" than the government action that the leaker is trying to expose and that the government is trying to conceal.

Now, the Plame case is very unusual, because it involves a leak of information that was not meant to expose bad actions by the government, but was (allegedly) an attempt to take political revenge on someone. In other words, the concealed information (that the ambassador's wife was a covert CIA operative) wasn't anything bad; it was the use of a leak to take political revenge that was the bad act; so this is one of those unusual "opposite" cases. There's a saying, lawyers will be familiar with it, that "hard cases make bad law". It means that sometimes you can have a case that is so unusual and so compelling that your desire to do justice in that particular case leads you to make a rule of law that actually works against justice in most cases. I think the Palme case is one of those.

[DaveE]

Bob Novak wrote the original editorial outing the CIA employee. Has he talked about his source? If not, how has he gotten off so lightly?

[jyl]

It's a mystery. Novak, who received the original leak and wrote the original story "outing" the covert CIA operative, has apparently cooperated with the prosecutors, but he won't say what he's revealed.

I'm not clear why the New York Times reporter became such a prosecutorial target. It would seem that Novak would know who the leaker was. Perhaps this is simply the prosecutor flexing his muscle - federal prosecutors are very powerful people after all.

Here is a brief summary of who reported what (taken from http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=bfaf5e4a-e473-4f52-933e-abf55e7fa112

But the mystery at the heart of Leakgate revolves around whether the White House outed Ms. Plame in 2003 as a way to deflect criticism over the war in Iraq.

In the past week, it has been revealed that Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's chief political strategist, was among the White House officials who had spoken to Mr. Cooper during key periods in 2003 before Ms. Plame was named in print.

Her husband is former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, who in 2003 was harshly critical of Mr. Bush for linking Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Wilson, a former acting ambassador to Iraq, had travelled to Niger in 2002 for the CIA to probe allegations the African country was supplying uranium to Saddam Hussein.

He found no evidence of a connection and chastised Mr. Bush after the President claimed in a State of the Union speech the Iraqi dictator sought uranium "yellowcake" from Africa.

Ms. Plame was first named as a CIA agent in a July, 2003, newspaper column by conservative writer Robert Novak, who identified "senior administration officials" as his sources.

Mr. Cooper followed suit in a Time article three days later.

Ms. Miller had also worked on the story, but never published an article about Ms. Plame.

Another article
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4151515

[BlueSkyJaunte]

How is outing a covert CIA operative in the public's interest? It's pure sensationalism. A reporter shouldn't get any protection for that.

Now, outing the guy who outed the CIA operative, THAT'S in the public's interest!

[jyl]

Blue, your post illustrates my point about hard cases making bad law.

I also see no public interest in outing this covert CIA operative, so if the Plame case were viewed in isolation, I wouldn't see a public interest in protecting the reporter.

My point is that you cannot view this case in isolation. If you make a rule that reporters can be compelled to reveal their confidential sources, then that rule will apply in all cases.

Now think about all the cases when a reporter has broken a story based on a leak from a government source. How many cases involve concealed government actions that are underhanded, corrupt, illegal, and unethical so that it was good that the actions are exposed to public scrutiny? How many cases involve proper and blameless government actions so that there was nothing that needed to be exposed to public scrutiny? I believe the first category far outnumbers the second category. In other words, I think allowing reporters to vigorously investigate the government and write about it without fear of prosecution and subpeonas is, overall, serving an important public interest.

[techweenie]

I listened to Drudge trashing Lawrence O'Donnell on his show and it made me want to see what the 'right' is so afraid of.

Here is is, in his own words:
---------------------------------------
Lawrence O'Donnell
The One Very Good Reason Karl Rove Might Be Indicted

Two years ago, when I first read the federal law protecting the identities of covert agents, my reaction was the same as everyone else who reads it -- this is not an easy law to break. That’s what I said on Hardball then in my first public discussion of the outing of Valerie Plame, and that’s what I said on CNN the other night. Let’s walk through the pieces that would have to fall into place for Karl Rove to have committed a crime when he revealed Plame’s identity to Matt Cooper.

First, and most obviously, Valerie Plame had to be a covert agent when Rove exposed her to Cooper. It’s not obvious that she was. The law has a specific definition of covert agent that she might not fit -- an overseas posting in the last five years, for example. But it’s hard to believe the prosecutor didn’t begin the grand jury session with a CIA witness certifying that Plame was a covert agent. If the prosecutor couldn’t establish that, why bother moving on to the next witness?

Second, Rove had to know she was a covert agent. Cooper’s article refers to Plame as “a CIA official.” Most CIA officials are not covert agents.

Third, Rove had to know that the CIA was taking “affirmative measures” to hide her identity. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a political operative would or should know.

Fourth, Rove had to be “authorized” to have classified information about covert agents or at least this one covert agent. Doesn’t seem like the kind of security clearance a political operative would or should have.

I’ll be surprised if all four of those elements of the crime line up perfectly for a Rove indictment. Surprised, not shocked. There is one very good reason to think they might. It is buried in one of the handful of federal court opinions that have come down in the last year ordering Matt Cooper and Judy Miller to testify or go to jail.

In February, Circuit Judge David Tatel joined his colleagues’ order to Cooper and Miller despite his own, very lonely finding that indeed there is a federal privilege for reporters that can shield them from being compelled to testify to grand juries and give up sources. He based his finding on Rule 501 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which authorizes federal courts to develop new privileges “in the light of reason and experience.” Tatel actually found that reason and experience “support recognition of a privilege for reporters’ confidential sources.” But Tatel still ordered Cooper and Miller to testify because he found that the privilege had to give way to “the gravity of the suspected crime.”

Judge Tatel’s opinion has eight blank pages in the middle of it where he discusses the secret information the prosecutor has supplied only to the judges to convince them that the testimony he is demanding is worth sending reporters to jail to get. The gravity of the suspected crime is presumably very well developed in those redacted pages. Later, Tatel refers to “[h]aving carefully scrutinized [the prosecutor’s] voluminous classified filings.”

Some of us have theorized that the prosecutor may have given up the leak case in favor of a perjury case, but Tatel still refers to it simply as a case “which involves the alleged exposure of a covert agent.” Tatel wrote a 41-page opinion in which he seemed eager to make new law -- a federal reporters’ shield law -- but in the end, he couldn’t bring himself to do it in this particular case. In his final paragraph, he says he “might have” let Cooper and Miller off the hook “[w]ere the leak at issue in this case less harmful to national security.”

Tatel’s colleagues are at least as impressed with the prosecutor’s secret filings as he is. One simply said “Special Counsel’s showing decides the case.”

All the judges who have seen the prosecutor’s secret evidence firmly believe he is pursuing a very serious crime, and they have done everything they can to help him get an indictment.

[pwd72s]

Loose lips sink ships