A Free Press vs. Government Secrecy

The drool cup crowd is in full howl over disclosures of secret government programs in The New York Times.

As a 35-year veteran of the newspaper biz, I usually avoid commenting on the partisan Strum und Drang accompanying disclosures in the mainstream media that embarrass the high and mighty.

Most of this whinging is not worth the powder to blow it up with.

But people like the woman in the photograph have gone way over the top in saying that The Times -- the newspaper that broke the Pentagon Papers and My Lai Massacre stories, among many others that the U.S. government didn't want you to know about -- would have outted Anne Frank.

Frank was a Jewish girl who wrote a diary while in hiding with her family in Amsterdam during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. After two years in hiding, she and her family were betrayed and sent to concentration camps. She died of typhus at age 16.

Behind the furor is the reality that conservatives are less concerned about The Times outting secret government programs than a blood lust desire to drive it out of business. After all, The Wall Street Journal also ran a story on the Bush administration monitoring financial records and the conservative wherewolves barely showed their fangs.

The Times makes buckets of money and isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but the furor comes at an inopportune time for it and the rest of the mainstream media.

The Times, among others, has made some pretty serious errors that undermine their credibility. Just the other day, USA Today said that it was now unable to confirm that two of the three telecoms it said had deals with the National Security Agency concerning its domestic spying program were indeed participants.

During my 35-year career, I was involved in a fair number of decisions regarding whether to publish an exposé with information that would anger, embarrass or endanger people. These playing God decisions often were agonizing, but always were made with a deliberateness that came down to this:

Regardless of how a story might anger, embarrass or endanger, does publishing it serve the greater public good?

And is serving that greater public good worth the risk of facing criticism, losing readers and even being sued in a court of law?

The stories that I agonized over were, for the most part, more mundane than domestic spying programs.

Four examples:

Should we publish a series of articles identifying impaired doctors who butchered their patients because there was no real professional or state oversight?

Should we endanger people who were in vulnerable positions by revealing that an aide to a city councilman was running a methamphetamine trafficking ring out of his City Hall office?

Should we include in the obituary of a politician who was adamantly anti-gay that he had a suicide pact with his homosexual lover?

Should we identify an individual whom we knew had escaped the scrutinty of homicide detectives in the murder of a child many years earlier?

In three of the four cases, the decision was to publish because we believed the greater public good would be served.

In two of those three cases, we were sued. In two of those three cases, the lawsuits were dismissed. The other case went to trial and ended in a hung jury.

In the fourth case, the story identifying the murderer, we decided not to publish because the perpetrator and the victim's parents were long dead, and we felt that embarrassing the perpetrator's survivors did not outweigh identifying him. I have since regretted that decision.

THE LEAKER IN CHIEF

Let us also remember that the secrecy obsessed Bush administration has leaked classified information when it believes there is political advantage in doing so.

The leaks that led to the Plame-Libby grand jury investigation and indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, and gave Karl Rove agita are Exhibit A in this regard. And with whom did the leaks begin? President Bush himself.

Murray Waas, who has been all over the story from the outset, writes in a new National Journal story that:

[Bush] had directed Cheney . . . to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson.

QUOTE DU JOUR

David Remmick in The New Yorker:

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others in the Nixon-Agnew-Ford orbit left Washington believing that the imperial Presidency had been disastrously hobbled by a now imperial press. When they reappeared in 2001, under the auspices of George W. Bush, the Nixon-Agnew spirit was resurrected with them -- this time without the Joycean wordplay. More than any other White House in history, Bush’s has tried to starve, mock, weaken, bypass, devalue, intimidate, and deceive the press, using tactics far more toxic than any prose devised in the name of Spiro Agnew.

'IT IS NOT A RESPONSIBILITY WE CAN SURRENDER'

If you've lost sight of the role of a free and vigilant press in a democracy, never understood it or are confused or angered over the recent MSM disclosures of secret government programs, then I urge you to read these thoughts by Dean Baquet, editor of The Los Angeles Times, and Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times.

And try, for just a moment, to walk in their shoes:

Since Sept. 11, 2001, newspaper editors have faced excruciating choices in covering the government's efforts to protect the country from terrorist agents. Each of us has, on a number of occasions, withheld information because we were convinced that publishing it could put lives at risk. On other occasions, each of us has decided to publish classified information over strong objections from our government.

Last week our newspapers disclosed a secret Bush administration program to monitor international banking transactions. We did so after appeals from senior administration officials to hold the story. Our reports — like earlier press disclosures of secret measures to combat terrorism — revived an emotional national debate, featuring angry calls of "treason" and proposals that journalists be jailed along with much genuine concern and confusion about the role of the press in times like these.

We are rivals. Our newspapers compete on a hundred fronts every day. We apply the principles of journalism individually as editors of independent newspapers. We agree, however, on some basics about the immense responsibility the press has been given by the inventors of the country.

Make no mistake, journalists have a large and personal stake in the country's security. We live and work in cities that have been tragically marked as terrorist targets. Reporters and photographers from both our papers braved the collapsing towers to convey the horror to the world.

We have correspondents today alongside troops on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others risk their lives in a quest to understand the terrorist threat; Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal was murdered on such a mission. We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle against terrorism.

But the virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings. It is also aimed at our values, at our freedoms and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

Thirty-five years ago yesterday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people."

As that sliver of judicial history reminds us, the conflict between the government's passion for secrecy and the press's drive to reveal is not of recent origin. This did not begin with the Bush administration, although the polarization of the electorate and the daunting challenge of terrorism have made the tension between press and government as clamorous as at any time since Justice Black wrote.

Our job, especially in times like these, is to bring our readers information that will enable them to judge how well their elected leaders are fighting on their behalf, and at what price.

In recent years our papers have brought you a great deal of information the White House never intended for you to know — classified secrets about the questionable intelligence that led the country to war in Iraq, about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the transfer of suspects to countries that are not squeamish about using torture, about eavesdropping without warrants.

As Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of The Washington Post, asked recently in the pages of that newspaper: "You may have been shocked by these revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America's name, shouldn't Americans understand how it is being waged?"

Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes. A few days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was scandalized by our decision to report on the bank-monitoring program. But in September 2003 the same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters from our papers, The Wall Street Journal and others to travel with him and his aides on a military aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the department's efforts to track terrorist financing. The secretary's team discussed many sensitive details of their monitoring efforts, hoping they would appear in print and demonstrate the administration's relentlessness against the terrorist threat.

How do we, as editors, reconcile the obligation to inform with the instinct to protect?

Sometimes the judgments are easy. Our reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, take great care not to divulge operational intelligence in their news reports, knowing that in this wired age it could be seen and used by insurgents.

Often the judgments are painfully hard. In those cases, we cool our competitive jets and begin an intensive deliberative process.

The process begins with reporting. Sensitive stories do not fall into our hands. They may begin with a tip from a source who has a grievance or a guilty conscience, but those tips are just the beginning of long, painstaking work. Reporters operate without security clearances, without subpoena powers, without spy technology. They work, rather, with sources who may be scared, who may know only part of the story, who may have their own agendas that need to be discovered and taken into account. We double-check and triple-check. We seek out sources with different points of view. We challenge our sources when contradictory information emerges.

Then we listen. No article on a classified program gets published until the responsible officials have been given a fair opportunity to comment. And if they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing. Often, we agree to participate in off-the-record conversations with officials, so they can make their case without fear of spilling more secrets onto our front pages.

Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula, no neat metric for either the public's interest or the dangers of publishing sensitive information. We make our best judgment.

When we come down in favor of publishing, of course, everyone hears about it. Few people are aware when we decide to hold an article. But each of us, in the past few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying articles when the administration convinced us that the risk of publication outweighed the benefits. Probably the most discussed instance was The New York Times's decision to hold its article on telephone eavesdropping for more than a year, until editors felt that further reporting had whittled away the administration's case for secrecy.

But there are other examples. The New York Times has held articles that, if published, might have jeopardized efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material, and articles about highly sensitive counterterrorism initiatives that are still in operation. In April, The Los Angeles Times withheld information about American espionage and surveillance activities in Afghanistan discovered on computer drives purchased by reporters in an Afghan bazaar.

It is not always a matter of publishing an article or killing it. Sometimes we deal with the security concerns by editing out gratuitous detail that lends little to public understanding but might be useful to the targets of surveillance. The Washington Post, at the administration's request, agreed not to name the specific countries that had secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons, deeming that information not essential for American readers. The New York Times, in its article on National Security Agency eavesdropping, left out some technical details.

Even the banking articles, which the president and vice president have condemned, did not dwell on the operational or technical aspects of the program, but on its sweep, the questions about its legal basis and the issues of oversight.

We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices — to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government.