[Infowarrior] - NYT/LAT Editors' OpEd: When Do We Publish a Secret?

[Richard Forno]

July 1, 2006
Op-Ed Contributors
When Do We Publish a Secret?
By DEAN BAQUET, editor, The Los Angeles Times, and BILL KELLER, executive
editor, The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/01/opinion/01keller.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pag
ewanted=print

SINCE Sept. 11, 2001, newspaper editors have faced excruciating choices in
covering the government's efforts to protect the country from terrorist
agents. Each of us has, on a number of occasions, withheld information
because we were convinced that publishing it could put lives at risk. On
other occasions, each of us has decided to publish classified information
over strong objections from our government.

Last week our newspapers disclosed a secret Bush administration program to
monitor international banking transactions. We did so after appeals from
senior administration officials to hold the story. Our reports ‹ like
earlier press disclosures of secret measures to combat terrorism ‹ revived
an emotional national debate, featuring angry calls of "treason" and
proposals that journalists be jailed along with much genuine concern and
confusion about the role of the press in times like these.

We are rivals. Our newspapers compete on a hundred fronts every day. We
apply the principles of journalism individually as editors of independent
newspapers. We agree, however, on some basics about the immense
responsibility the press has been given by the inventors of the country.

Make no mistake, journalists have a large and personal stake in the
country's security. We live and work in cities that have been tragically
marked as terrorist targets. Reporters and photographers from both our
papers braved the collapsing towers to convey the horror to the world.

We have correspondents today alongside troops on the front lines in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Others risk their lives in a quest to understand the terrorist
threat; Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal was murdered on such a
mission. We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle
against terrorism.

But the virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature,
is directed not just against our people and our buildings. It is also aimed
at our values, at our freedoms and at our faith in the self-government of an
informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans
uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

Thirty-five years ago yesterday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped
the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the
Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "The government's power to censor
the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to
censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the
secrets of the government and inform the people."

As that sliver of judicial history reminds us, the conflict between the
government's passion for secrecy and the press's drive to reveal is not of
recent origin. This did not begin with the Bush administration, although the
polarization of the electorate and the daunting challenge of terrorism have
made the tension between press and government as clamorous as at any time
since Justice Black wrote.

Our job, especially in times like these, is to bring our readers information
that will enable them to judge how well their elected leaders are fighting
on their behalf, and at what price.

In recent years our papers have brought you a great deal of information the
White House never intended for you to know ‹ classified secrets about the
questionable intelligence that led the country to war in Iraq, about the
abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the transfer of suspects
to countries that are not squeamish about using torture, about eavesdropping
without warrants.

As Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of The Washington Post, asked recently
in the pages of that newspaper: "You may have been shocked by these
revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred
not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America's name,
shouldn't Americans understand how it is being waged?"

Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to
protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes. A few
days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was scandalized by our
decision to report on the bank-monitoring program. But in September 2003 the
same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters from our papers, The Wall
Street Journal and others to travel with him and his aides on a military
aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the department's efforts to track
terrorist financing. The secretary's team discussed many sensitive details
of their monitoring efforts, hoping they would appear in print and
demonstrate the administration's relentlessness against the terrorist
threat.

How do we, as editors, reconcile the obligation to inform with the instinct
to protect?

Sometimes the judgments are easy. Our reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, for
example, take great care not to divulge operational intelligence in their
news reports, knowing that in this wired age it could be seen and used by
insurgents.

Often the judgments are painfully hard. In those cases, we cool our
competitive jets and begin an intensive deliberative process.

The process begins with reporting. Sensitive stories do not fall into our
hands. They may begin with a tip from a source who has a grievance or a
guilty conscience, but those tips are just the beginning of long,
painstaking work. Reporters operate without security clearances, without
subpoena powers, without spy technology. They work, rather, with sources who
may be scared, who may know only part of the story, who may have their own
agendas that need to be discovered and taken into account. We double-check
and triple-check. We seek out sources with different points of view. We
challenge our sources when contradictory information emerges.

Then we listen. No article on a classified program gets published until the
responsible officials have been given a fair opportunity to comment. And if
they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national
security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing. Often,
we agree to participate in off-the-record conversations with officials, so
they can make their case without fear of spilling more secrets onto our
front pages.

Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing.
There is no magic formula, no neat metric for either the public's interest
or the dangers of publishing sensitive information. We make our best
judgment.

When we come down in favor of publishing, of course, everyone hears about
it. Few people are aware when we decide to hold an article. But each of us,
in the past few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying
articles when the administration convinced us that the risk of publication
outweighed the benefits. Probably the most discussed instance was The New
York Times's decision to hold its article on telephone eavesdropping for
more than a year, until editors felt that further reporting had whittled
away the administration's case for secrecy.

But there are other examples. The New York Times has held articles that, if
published, might have jeopardized efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles
of nuclear material, and articles about highly sensitive counterterrorism
initiatives that are still in operation. In April, The Los Angeles Times
withheld information about American espionage and surveillance activities in
Afghanistan discovered on computer drives purchased by reporters in an
Afghan bazaar.

It is not always a matter of publishing an article or killing it. Sometimes
we deal with the security concerns by editing out gratuitous detail that
lends little to public understanding but might be useful to the targets of
surveillance. The Washington Post, at the administration's request, agreed
not to name the specific countries that had secret Central Intelligence
Agency prisons, deeming that information not essential for American readers.
The New York Times, in its article on National Security Agency
eavesdropping, left out some technical details.

Even the banking articles, which the president and vice president have
condemned, did not dwell on the operational or technical aspects of the
program, but on its sweep, the questions about its legal basis and the
issues of oversight.

We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices ‹
to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the
responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our
independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one
we can surrender to the government.

‹ DEAN BAQUET, editor, The Los Angeles Times, and BILL KELLER, executive
editor, The New York Times