Duty under siege

THE Judith Miller soap opera shuddered to an all-too-appropriate close this week in the all-but-inevitable forums -- on the talk shows and the Internet.

Call it the final installment of “Desperate Reporters.”

The veteran New York Times reporter served 85 days in a federal lockup for refusing to name a confidential source to a grand jury investigating the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity to a clutch of Washington reporters. As it turned out, Miller’s source was former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. He is under indictment for his alleged part in a whispering campaign designed to discredit Plame’s husband, the former U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had gone public with charges that the Bush administration distorted intelligence reports on Saddam Hussein’s purported attempts to obtain material for a nuclear weapon.

Within days of Miller’s release from jail, the details of her decidedly irregular dealings with Libby became public, and her image underwent a public meltdown unmatched since Dorothy sloshed the Wicked Witch of the West with that bucket of water. Wednesday, the New York Times announced that the 57-year-old Miller had “agreed” to retire, and the paper published a letter to the editor in which she replied to her own editors’ and colleagues’ criticisms.

By Thursday night, Miller -- every inch the genially unflappable onetime Hollywood High drama student -- was on Larry King’s CNN talk show deftly deflecting her avuncular host’s deferential questions, while just as deftly avoiding the usual questions phoned in from his viewers. Meanwhile, the Times’ publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., was taking the chattering classes’ version of the high road on Charlie Rose’s PBS program. (Morale problem? What morale problem?)

The morbidly curious who want the fullest possible explication of Miller’s side of this whole murky narrative can go to her personal website, www.judithmiller.org. These days, the Web is where yesterday’s personalities and controversies can transcend their 15 minutes of fame. Personal websites are the side chapels of cyberspace, where ego-fueled votive candles keep flickering vigil before the icon of self-regard.

Unfortunately, the wreckage of this tatty little melodrama has obscured a point that should never have been lost. From day one, the conduct of Judith Miller the individual journalist and what was done to her and to the other reporters involved by Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald were entirely -- indeed, necessarily -- divisible issues.

Because federal law does not grant journalists the same protection against being compelled to reveal confidential sources recognized by nearly all the 50 states, Miller, Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper and NBC’s Tim Russert are going to have to testify at Libby’s trial. Because the government’s case against Vice President Dick Cheney’s former aide turns on the contradictions between what Libby and these reporters told the grand jury about their conversations, Libby’s defense attorneys will not be bound by any of the limitations Fitzgerald accepted to obtain their testimony. On cross-examination, these journalists turned reluctant prosecution witnesses are likely to be grilled on every aspect of their reportage, published or unpublished.

It’s hard to imagine a more chilling prospect for a free press, but one did arise this week, all but obscured in the gossipy penumbra cast by the Miller melodrama.

On Nov. 2, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest revealed that the CIA has been running a secret prison system in which alleged Al Qaeda members and their allies are held without legal sanction and tortured. These so-called “black sites” are a critical component in the Bush administration’s covert attempt to legitimize torture as an instrument of state policy.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told Editor & Publisher’s online edition that Priest’s article was “an incredible piece of journalism that informed the public about questionable behavior by government officials.”

Two of the administration’s leading congressional allies -- Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) -- don’t agree. Tuesday, they ordered an official inquiry into whether what they termed Priest’s “egregious disclosure” could have “long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences.”

You bet it will, for the torturers and, maybe for Priest, if she now is dragged in front of a congressional committee and threatened with contempt unless she reveals her sources.

In the mordant calculus of human suffering, the urge to persecute journalists for the pseudo-crime of informing the public cannot be equated with the Bush administration’s adoption of torture as an instrument of state policy. Both affront our common-sense notions of what is decent for a similar reason.

In the years since Sept. 11, the notion has taken root in some circles, particularly inside this administration, that because American power is virtuous, it need not subject itself to limits or restraint. If some loathsome Islamo-fascist creep won’t tell you what you think you want to know, torture him until he does. If some reporter tells inconvenient truths about what’s going on in your secret prisons, drag her into a star chamber and grill her about where she got her facts and, if she doesn’t answer, jail her until she does.

Lost in all this heedless self-righteousness is one of the fundamental things that makes the American system and Al Qaeda’s utterly inimical to one another: Osama bin Laden and his accomplices believe that the sanctity of their desired end justifies any means to achieve it. Hence, the sequence of outrages that treat with equal contempt the innocent lives of office workers in lower Manhattan and wedding guests in an Amman hotel.

We Americans always have believed that there are things we cannot do, even in the pursuit of our highest ideals. We have enshrined that crucial inhibition in the social arrangement we call the rule of law and, more important, in our individual consciences. It is part of the particular American genius that we are an obsessively “can-do” people who reflexively acknowledge the notion of restraint. It’s why we stop at traffic signals, even in the middle of the night, and accept the results of elections, no matter how close or bitter.

It’s why we feel a sense of revulsion when we read that the executive branch of our government now operates secret torture chambers and that the only response of its congressional allies to that revelation is an attempt to silence the journalistic messenger who told us what was going on.

Americans instinctively know that what people or politicians say they’re going to do isn’t really as important as it seems. Real life is chaotic and punctuated with the unforeseeable, so even the best intentioned people and governments seldom, if ever, get the chance to do precisely what they say they’re going to do. It’s one of the reasons no sensible person pays attention to party platforms.

In the end, what’s really important about individuals, institutions and governments is the one thing they actually can control -- and that’s what they won’t do, like torture people or jail journalists for doing their jobs.