Spin cycle springs a leak

THIS week’s revelation that a former White House aide testified under oath that President George W. Bush personally authorized the leak of classified information as part of a campaign to discredit a prominent critic of the Iraq war raises a number of difficult questions for the press.

According to court papers filed late Wednesday by Patrick J. Fitzgerald -- the special prosecutor investigating the leak of ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity to the press -- Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, testified that, in the summer of 2003, his then-boss told him Bush had personally approved the leak of a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate to Judith Miller, then a reporter for the New York Times.

Some of the caveats normally attached to such news already have fallen away. At Friday’s White House briefing, Bush’s spokesman, Scott McClellan, did not contradict Libby’s testimony. Instead, he simply drew a distinction between what the president did and his frequent denunciations of leakers.

“The president would never authorize disclosure of information that could compromise our nation’s security,” McClellan said.

Right, and how convenient that the realization that there was no security risk in leaking a classified document alleging that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase African uranium just happened to coincide with the need to justify the invasion of Iraq as part of the president’s reelection campaign.

It does seem clear, though, that whatever their real intentions, neither Libby nor Cheney nor the president broke the law in this matter. (Libby was indicted for allegedly lying about whether he told Miller that Plame worked for the CIA.) Most legal authorities agree that the president has the power to declassify information virtually at will. Thursday, Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales went further, saying the president has the “inherent authority to decide who should have classified information.” That wasn’t a surprise, of course. Earlier in the week, Gonzales testified to Congress that the president has “inherent authority” to order warrantless wiretaps of American citizens communicating with each other inside the United States.

Next week, it’s not out of the question that he’ll testify Bush has the “inherent authority” to suspend the law of gravity.

More interesting was Fitzgerald’s disclosure Wednesday that Libby’s leak to Miller was the result of “a strong desire by many, including multiple people in the White House, to repudiate” charges made in a July 2003 New York Times op-ed essay by Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, whom the CIA sent to investigate reports that Iraq had tried to buy bomb-making material in Niger. In his piece, Wilson wrote that “some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

Friday, the Washington Post quoted an anonymous “senior White House official” as saying that “Bush authorized the release of the classified information to assure the public of his rationale for war as it was coming under increasing scrutiny.”

Here’s where things get complicated for the press.

Why did Libby choose Miller as the initial bearer of that assurance?

Well, according to Libby’s indictment, he first told her of Plame’s identity and her connection to Wilson on June 23, 2003 -- 13 days before Wilson’s essay was published. Miller didn’t write a story then and she didn’t write one after Libby passed her the classified information on July 8. In fact, Miller -- who went to jail rather than answer questions about Libby -- never wrote a story about Plame or Wilson’s mission to Niger.

Why not?

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, she was one of the reporters whose anonymously sourced stories on Hussein’s alleged quest to acquire weapons of mass destruction helped persuade a skeptical nation and the editorial pages of most major newspapers that war was justified.

Judy Miller was nothing if not an aggressive reporter and yet, in this instance, she never wrote. Was it because she was reluctant or were her editors skeptical -- or did something else intervene? When she didn’t report the leak, the administration simply went along Washington’s journalistic food chain until it found someone -- the columnist Robert Novak -- willing to reveal Plame’s identity.

But the chain began with Miller.

She has subsequently left the Times under a cloud of contradiction and recrimination. The circumstances surrounding her dealings with Libby, though, could provide the press -- and, more important, those who rely on it -- with valuable insight into the ways in which the mutual use and misuse of anonymity both informs and misleads the American electorate.

Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, who recently broke the story of the CIA secret prison network, has described the official use of targeted leaks as a “trendmill.” Self-interested officials leak selective information to handpicked reporters and, pretty soon, a story cycle begins to spin, pushing popular opinion in the desired direction.

We know something like that happened in the months leading to the war in Iraq. It’s worth knowing whether something similar was attempted by the same administration players in the months leading up to Bush’s reelection. Miller and her former editors might want to weigh the question of whether they have an obligation in this regard.

John Wheeler, the great physicist who coined the term “black hole,” once remarked that, in the quantum universe, “a sibyl seems to say: Choose -- paradox or nothing.”

When it comes to the use of anonymous sources, something similar attains. As the New York Times’ recent stories on warrantless government eavesdropping have reminded us, some of the most urgent and important journalism would be impossible if reporters were not allowed to guarantee anonymity to some people under certain, carefully thought-out circumstances.

Clearly, anonymity cannot be a mere convenience for either reporter or source. Sometimes, though, it is a necessity, and those who insist otherwise simply aren’t being serious. However, it’s also frivolous -- perhaps even reckless -- to ignore the paradoxical realization that the news media’s ability to hold the identities of certain sources secret now turns on being open about how and why such decisions are made.

Experience is teaching us that there comes a moment in the life of every story when discretion must give way to candor -- or, in the current techno-patois, transparency. If that doesn’t happen, there’s a growing risk that public trust will be forfeit. Without that, there won’t be any point to keeping secrets -- or any place to print them. Prudent reporters and editors will have to determine for themselves when that moment has arrived, but it’s worse than imprudent to pretend it never does.

It’s worth asking whether that moment has arrived for Judy Miller and her former employer.