CIA Article Sidebar: A Story of Deja Vu

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Some Critics See a Plame Parallel
Dana Priest, and her newspaper, are being hit from both sides.
Some conservatives are furious over her Washington Post story this month disclosing that the CIA has been hiding and interrogating terror suspects at secret prisons in Eastern Europe. And some liberals are angry that The Post agreed to a request by senior U.S. officials not to name the countries involved. "We are being accused of being in the pocket of the administration," Priest says. "One student called me up from a Virginia university to tell me they were burning the paper at a protest, because we're complicit in torture."

With the House intelligence committee launching an investigation into the leak of classified information and the CIA referring the matter to the Justice Department, the controversy could mushroom into another Valerie Plame fracas. If prosecutors get involved, Priest could face the same dilemma that confronted Time's Matt Cooper and former New York Times reporter Judith Miller: whether to reveal confidential sources under threat of imprisonment.

"Judy Miller went to jail," said author and radio host Bill Bennett, a fierce critic of the Post story. "This woman might have to go to jail too. . . . The hypocrisy here is for the media establishment to say some great wrong was done to Valerie Plame, but where is the outrage about Dana Priest?" Says Priest: "My overall goal is to describe how the government is fighting the war on terror, and that gets you right to the CIA. This is a tactic. People can read it and decide whether that's good or bad."

Leonard Downie, the Post's executive editor, says: "There was a lot of debate about every aspect of the story to make sure we were balancing legitimate national security concerns with informing our readers about important things that were being done in their name by the government. There were a number of discussions with senior U.S. officials, and we had a number of discussions in the office over several days with Dana and her editors." Both the Nov. 2 prison story and the 2003 outing of Plame as a CIA operative relied on unnamed sources giving reporters secret information. In the Plame case, however, senior officials were trying to discredit White House critic Joe Wilson by focusing on the role of his wife in his inquiry into whether Iraq was trying to acquire nuclear material. Many on the left have cheered the resulting perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges against former vice-presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Democrats want a stepped-up congressional probe of the administration's prewar intelligence.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/13/AR2005111301297.html