Page 53 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Anonymous Sources, Leaks, and Nat onal Secur ty

Karl Rove, Bush’s powerful deputy chief of staff, confirmed Ms. Plame’s identity
to two reporters, but continued in his job.
Ultimately, nobody was criminally charged with knowingly leaking the name
of an undercover CIA officer. But I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick
Cheney’s former chief of staff, was convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice
and lying to the FBI. He was found guilty of lying about his role in a White
House campaign to discredit Wilson, a vocal critic of the Iraq war. Stripped of
the complex legal language, Libby’s crime was that he had not given a grand
jury an accurate version of his conversations with reporters. Libby could have
reasonably anticipated that reporters would keep his confidences, as is their cus-
tom. But they were pressured by a vigorous prosecutor, and they buckled. At the
trial, the chief witnesses against Libby turned out to be reporters who had once
used him as a source.
In the course of the investigation of Libby, Judith Miller, then of the New York
Times and one of the reporters who had used Libby as a source, was subpoe-
naed. She had indeed discussed the Wilson investigation with Libby, as he had
with other reporters, but Miller never wrote a story. In her confidential conver-
sation, she had promised Libby not to disclose who he was. And Libby provided
information on the understanding that it could be used so long as he was not
named directly. When the prosecutor demanded she discuss that conversation,
Miller balked. Upholding the important principle that reporters must protect
the identity of confidential sources, she went to jail to protect Libby’s identity.
Then after 85 days, she was released from jail once Libby explicitly gave her per-
mission to testify—first at the grand jury, then at trial. And eventually that testi-
mony helped to convict Libby of federal charges.
To complicate matters, Miller was a very controversial reporter with a politi-
cal cloud over her head. She had been singled out by certain critics on the left as
someone who had written stories about weapons of mass destruction that were
uncritically favorable to the administration in the run up to the invasion of Iraq.
However, at the time she was writing, many people, including Saddam’s own
generals, felt that the Iraqi leader had weapons of mass destruction.
Months after she was released, in a television interview, Miller said: “Going
to jail for me was not a career move, not a career enhancement move. Going to
jail was something I felt I had to do. I didn’t want to do it. I hadn’t sought a
confrontation with the government. I’d never written anything. It was a question
of principle and conscience. And whatever anyone else said, in a way, was ir-
relevant to me. It was painful. It was extremely painful for my friends and fam-
ily. But I knew why I was in jail. And I knew that I was in jail for a cause that
I thought was essential to our profession. So I was very comfortable with the
decision. But was it painful? Yes. Was it disappointing? Yes. Was it infuriating?
Yes. It’s journalism.”
As principled as Miller thought her cause, she was unable to explain to the
broader public why her resistance to the government served a noble purpose.
What Miller’s travails showed was that if journalism, particularly in Washing-
ton, must be an insider’s game, journalists then need to explain their role more
convincingly.