CIA leak tests journalistic ethics

[struggle4progress]

By VIEWPOINT: David Ignatius

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WASHINGTON — It’s hard to fathom the continuing legal squeeze on Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper and The New York Times’ Judith Miller to reveal their sources in a White House leak investigation. Unless, that is, the real concern of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald isn’t just the leak, but possible perjury by a senior Bush administration official.
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If Fitzgerald’s investigation has now expanded to include perjury, as some close followers of the case suspect, that sharpens the dilemma for the journalists involved. It’s one thing to protect the identity of a confidential source. But it is arguably quite a different matter if the reporter has reason to believe a source lied to a grand jury.
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The case is rooted in President Bush’s Jan. 2003 claim that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Africa for its alleged nuclear-weapons program. On July 6, 2003, a former ambassador named Joseph Wilson, who had been sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to investigate the uranium claim, published an op-ed piece in The New York Times saying he hadn’t found any credible evidence to support the charge.
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Administration officials responded with a pointed leak. On July 14, syndicated columnist Robert Novak published an article outing Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as “an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction” and citing “two senior administration officials” who believed she had suggested sending her husband to Niger. Three days later, Cooper published a similar report about Plame in Time’s online edition, attributing it to “some government officials.” Miller of the Times, meanwhile, met on July 8 with a government official with whom she may have discussed the Plame matter, according to a subpoena filed in the case, but she never published a story. <snip>

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