Los Angeles Times
October 1, 2004
There's a new front in the Justice Department's war on terror — a battle
against press freedom. Not content with subpoenaing journalists in his inquiry
into the identity of the government official who leaked the identity of CIA
officer Valerie Plame, Patrick J. Fitzgerald — the U.S. attorney in
Chicago and special prosecutor in the Plame case — is now seeking phone
records of two New York Times reporters in an ostensibly unrelated matter.
Federal prosecutors insist that a 2001 search of the offices of an
Illinois-based Islamic charity was foiled when government insiders tipped off
the reporters. The Justice Department contends that leak was probably criminal.
But its apparent strategy to find the leaker is almost certainly
unconstitutional. The government believes that reporter Philip Shenon
telephoned the Global Relief Foundation on the eve of the raid to warn the
group. Shenon and reporter Judith Miller, who also learned of the imminent
search, maintain that they were engaged in r outine news-gathering.
The
Justice Department has asked for records of calls that Shenon and Miller made in
the months immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. Because the two veteran
journalists won't surrender those records, Fitzgerald is asking the telephone
company for them. Interestingly, Miller is also one of the journalists
subpoenaed in the Plame affair.
The New York Times filed suit Tuesday to
block what is, at base, a fishing expedition, if not outright harassment by a
prosecutor frustrated by his inability to make headway in the high-profile Plame
inquiry. The newspaper's lawyers rightly argue that the government's
overreaching request would net records of hundreds of privileged communications
between reporters and their sources "on a vast array of vitally important and
controversial matters" that had nothing to do with the foundation raid.
It is now up to a federal judge to remind the Justice Department that
an independent press won't long survive if reporters lose their ab ility to
protect the confidentiality of their sources.