Free to shoot from the hip

When Spc. Thomas Wilson, a scout with the Tennessee National Guard, stood up in Kuwait this week and confronted Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld over the Pentagon’s failure to properly equip his unit for their impending service in Iraq, he reaffirmed the indispensable role free speech plays in every American’s relationship to their government.

When Wilson’s motive subsequently was called into question after it emerged that he had discussed his question beforehand with a Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter embedded with his unit, it was a dramatic display of how speech and the institution of a free press have become intricately intertwined in the American mind. More than that, it was a reminder of how essential the conventions of mainstream journalism are in protecting the integrity of that interrelationship.

Wilson is the 31-year-old veteran who rose during a so-called town hall meeting Rumsfeld held with troops gearing up for combat in Kuwait and asked why his unit and others were being forced to scavenge scrap metal and glass from local landfills in order to prepare their unarmored transport for their coming deployment in Iraq. By the next day, the Defense secretary’s answer -- fumbling, lame, unconvincing and, as usual, condescending -- was Page 1 news across the country. Questions were raised in Congress. President Bush weighed in, acknowledging that the administration was doing everything it could to see that the troops in Iraq were getting the equipment they needed -- including the armored transport vehicles critical to protecting them from the roadside bombs that have become one of the Iraqi insurgents’ weapons of choice.

In other words, our soldiers and Marines don’t have what they need now -- an important story with deeply troubling implications.

But within 24 hours, the usual cast of radio talk-show ranters and Internet bloggers had begun a campaign to discredit Spc. Wilson and his question. Their opportunity to do so arose after the Chattanooga Times Free Press’ military affairs reporter, Edward Lee Pitts, told colleagues in an e-mail that he had helped Wilson to rehearse his question and had encouraged the soldier running the town hall meeting to call on Wilson.

According to the critics, Rumsfeld had been set up and Pitts was a reporter “with an agenda.”

In fact, Pitts was a reporter who forgot to follow a basic rule of responsible journalism: You owe your readers, viewers or listeners not only all the facts as you know them but also as full as possible an account of the context in which they arise. Pitts should have told his paper’s readers that he knew of the question in advance.

His own newspaper acknowledged that omission in a story the next day. But neither Pitts’ ill-advised withholding nor any subsequent report in any forum contradicted the question’s substantive relevance. In fact, over the past weeks, Pitts has written a number of stories about the inadequacies of the Tennessee National Guard’s equipment.

Moreover, Friday, the Nashville Tennessean published an interview with Wilson’s girlfriend in which she recounted a telephone conversation in which the Guardsman had described “brainstorming” questions he wanted to put to Rumsfeld, if he got the opportunity.

No intent to conceal there, and so much for the dupe and conspiracy theories.

Deeper in many of the same Thursday newspapers that carried the account of Wilson’s faceoff with Rumsfeld was another story about reporters and following the rules that make responsible journalism possible.

The New York Times’ Judith Miller and Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper currently are appealing a federal prosecutor’s attempt to have them jailed for contempt for refusing to name confidential sources to a grand jury investigating the leak of CIA agent Valerie Palme’s name to columnist Robert Novak.

Miller never wrote a story about the case, but prosecutors are insisting that she tell them who she may have talked to about it. Cooper has answered questions about a source who gave him permission to do so. Now, prosecutors embarked on a classic fishing expedition want to compel him to answer still other questions.

Wednesday, lawyers for both journalists -- who are free pending resolution of their appeals -- asked three appellate justices to acknowledge that their clients have at least some 1st Amendment protection from being forced to betray those individuals who spoke to them under promise of confidentiality.

Without such promises, the public’s right to know how its government conducts itself would go unexercised -- usually because knowledge inconveniences the powerful, as it did Rumsfeld this week.

Right-wing supporters of the administration and uncritical apologists for the war in Iraq would have their audiences and readers believe that Spc. Wilson was a dupe or collaborator with a conniving reporter. The evidence suggests something far different -- that both men are precisely what they appear to be:

Pitts is a reporter whose passion led him to forget that you have to follow all the rules, even when the story you’re reporting involves the lives and safety of people you’ve come to know and admire.

Wilson hardly seems the type to be anybody’s dupe. The blood of the red states hardly flows more crimson than it does in the Tennessee-Georgia highlands that the scout and his people call home. It’s a region that has sent generations of its sons to fight America’s wars and where plain-spoken eloquence is served up as routinely as grits. Wilson’s father, Lyndon, still bears the scars of the wounds he suffered as a Marine in Vietnam. His son enlisted in the guard because he missed the military life he’d enjoyed so much during a previous Air Force enlistment.

Nobody close to him seems to be buying the dupe theory.

Lyndon Wilson, who calls his son Jerry, told the New York Times on Thursday that “Rumsfeld said, ‘Any questions?’ Well, if you don’t really want questions, that’s the wrong thing to say to Jerry.”

Regina Wilson, Jerry’s ex-wife, told the Associated Press that “he’s always been like that. I don’t think he understands the concept of biting one’s tongue. It wouldn’t matter if it was Bush himself standing there, he would have dissed him the same.”

The willingness of legitimately aggrieved soldiers to “diss” even Cabinet secretaries and presidents is the ultimate guarantor of American democracy. Reporters like Edward Lee Pitts, Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper understand that, without the information to inform themselves, individual Americans’ willingness to speak their minds -- no matter how courageous -- is reduced to a futile exercise.

That’s why responsible news organizations have rules to ensure they can go on informing the public as their obligation to the 1st Amendment requires. That’s why principled reporters, like Miller and Cooper, are willing to face jail in the service of those rules and in fulfillment of that obligation.

That’s why this administration’s efforts to force them to choose between betrayal and jail are a disgrace.