By David Feige
Slate
Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005
As the investigation into claims that the Bush administration leaked the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame in an attempt to discredit her husband expands to include criminal charges, the Washington Post's star reporter Bob Woodward has taken center stage as the scandal's latest villain. The revelation that Woodward learned Plame's name several months before anyone else has led to angry challenges to his prolonged silence and even calls for his resignation. But Bob Woodward owes no apology. His silence hasn't betrayed the nation, the Washington Post readership, or anyone else. Legally speaking, all Woodward's discretion did was force Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to do his job. The real discussion here shouldn't be about why Woodward didn't come forward; it should be about why Fitzgerald didn't call.
In maintaining his silence, Woodward, more than anyone else in the Plamegate scandal, has upheld the highest standards of journalistic integrity and discretion. Perhaps this is because, more than anyone else, Woodward understands the tenuous and often strained relationship between a powerful government and its citizens. (Whether Woodward—who has made his career as a journalistic watchdog, attentively patrolling executive power run amok—had some special obligation to his editor is a different question.) Woodward's critics are essentially arguing that he should have volunteered information (whether directly to the prosecutor or functionally to the prosecutor via publication) before being asked—that is, he should have become an informant.
We have laws in this country that designate precisely when citizens are required to rat on other people. The laws, for instance, require doctors who witness injuries consistent with child sex abuse to call authorities; and social workers are obligated to snitch if they confront someone clearly about to physically harm another. Certain other professionals are also deemed by law to be "mandatory reporters." But outside these narrow confines, there is no law in our country imposing an obligation to begin or to assist in a criminal prosecution—not in drug cases, not in mob cases, not even in murder cases. And rightly so. America has been through McCarthyism before, and we have seen what a culture of informants can produce.
In America, it is the prosecutor's job to get information, not the citizen's to volunteer it—and this is for good reason. Many of our other important values—such as journalistic integrity, the right to privacy, or the right to be free from unwarranted searches and seizures—compete directly with an obligation to volunteer information. The value of our freedom from governmental authority is invariably tested during troubled times and generally faces its greatest challenges in the context of highly charged issues. But although it is chic to be patriotic, particularly in wartime, a vogue for cooperation with prosecutors shouldn't be confused with good policy. It is true that we prize honesty and integrity in America, and certainly we expect those summoned before a tribunal to testify completely and truthfully, but this is only required when someone is questioned by federal agents or compelled to testify. We may be a nation of Honest Abes, but we are not a nation of snitches.
http://www.slate.com/id/2131021/?nav=tap3
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