Spies, Lies and the Freedom of the Press

Re “Even Mozambique Wouldn’t Jail Them, but the U.S. Might,” Opinion, April 24: Floyd Abrams’ defense of his reporter clients Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper is wrong. His clients should go to jail. The 1st Amendment’s protection of speech is a defense against the government and a government’s suppression of speech. Only a source inside the government could have known that Valerie Plame was a U.S. spy.

The leak that Plame was a spy came from inside a government angry that her husband had exploded a lie that supported its false claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The court and the U.S. people have a right to know who it was in the Bush administration who “outed” Plame. Abrams, otherwise a distinguished 1st Amendment lawyer, this time is defending the government’s right to lie and get away with it.

Daniel N. Fox

Pomona

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How ironic that Abrams quotes Byron White, the late Supreme Court justice, in support of Abrams’ position that the U.S. Supreme Court should provide journalists a federal shield privilege. After all, it was Justice White who wrote the majority opinion in the 1972 Supreme Court decision, Branzburg vs. Hayes, specifically denying journalists just such a privilege. In that decision White wrote, “From the beginning of our country the press has operated without constitutional protection for press informants, and the press has flourished.”

Patrick Mattimore

Attorney and Fellow

Institute for Analytic

Journalism, San Francisco