If He Says He Can't Tell, Then Don't Ask!

Although President Bush says he did not request that the Justice Department investigate who leaked information about the secret NSA wiretapping program to the New York Times, he is clearly in favor of the investigation. He will surely also say that he wasn’t behind the recent CIA request for an investigation of the leak to the Washington Post regarding secret prisons in Eastern Europe, but he will be glad to see it happen.

First of all, both of these investigations will allow him to try to shift the story from the highly questionable programs to the leaks themselves. It also gives him the option of using the old “can’t comment on an ongoing investigation” line whenever he needs to duck a tough question. Finally, it tends to water down the impact of the CIA leak investigation by creating a form of “leak fatigue” among the public who will have a hard time keeping up with all the different investigations.

So here’s how I’m begging the White House press corps to deal with this situation:

1. Don’t let the leaks become the story. The stories are the underlying surveillance activity, and the possible existence of secret prisons. Bush says he can’t comment on ongoing investigations about leaks anyway, so don’t ask him about them, and don’t write about them unless the leakers come forward or the investigators choose to make information known about the investigation. Ask him instead about the program of domestic wiretapping, where there is not, as yet, an ongoing investigation. Ask him about the presence of secret prisons that operate outside the Geneva Conventions. These are still the real stories!
2. Recognize the difference between the leaks. In the case of Valerie Plame, without the leak, there is no story! There is just a woman doing her job. In the case of NSA wiretapping and secret prisons, the leaks revealed the story, but did not cause the story. If the activities that were the subject of the leaks are proven to be unlawful, then the leaks will amount to patriotic acts of whistleblowing. If the stories were discovered by industrious phone company employees or meticulous users of Google Earth instead of federal employees, they would be exactly the same stories!
3. Keep it simple. Remember that there are some basic principles here and your ability to make those principles understood are the measure of your reporting skill, not your ability to weave a complicated web of connections among the various investigations. Either domestic wiretapping is within the President’s authority, or it is not. Either secret prisons existed, or they did not. Either there will be more indictments in the CIA leak case, or there will not. None of these things are related to each other, or to the manner in which information about these activities becomes known. Those too are different stories.

So far, I’ve heard at least two pundits say that the news in 2006 will be dominated by the three leak investigations. Excuse me, but that sounds like a three pitch strikeout! In my estimation, the news in 2006 will be dominated by three stories that are almost entirely unrelated to leaks. These stories are:

1. The war in Iraq, and our ability to reduce troop levels without the country devolving into civil war.
2. Debate over the extent of the wartime powers of a President during a self-proclaimed endless war.
3. The struggle for control of Congress during the mid-term elections, which will hinge on how the Democrats can show they are a better choice than to continue with the corruption seen under the current Republican leadership.

Unless, of course, another girl goes missing in Aruba!