Security Leaks

June 25:

In my last post, I mentioned finding relatively few nits to pick with theTimes and Post coverage of Egypt last weekend. That wasn’t the case, however, with one of yesterday’s op-eds, the one by David Ignatius discussing the nature of national security leaks. Ignatius’s topic is thenew book by David Sanger of the New York Times, a book that has been sliced into strategic pieces and rolled out ahead of time to some acclaim and some teeth gnashing. Ignatius makes three points. The first is that all administrations leak, and most do so in a way that makes them look good. I grant the point, but there are degrees of this sort of political theater. Yes, it’s true, as Ignatius says, that the leaks about coordinated U.S.–Israeli efforts at cyberwar against Iran go back to the Bush years. But those leaks occurred after President Bush’s re-election. The leaks we’ve seen lately have a different flavor to them, a far more partisan flavor.

Ignatius’s second point is that most reporters gather information from various sources and only once they have a picture of reality do they go looking for sensitive, sometimes classified, information in the form of a leak. There is a remark in the book, which Ignatius quotes, to the extent that an official refuses to discuss certain information with a reporter on the grounds that it is classified, but Sanger (who is the reporter) answers that it won’t be secret for long once it shows up in the paper the next day, upon which the official relents and starts to gab. This has the ring of truth, but it also stinks to high hell. It is indicative of the profound lack of discipline that has overtaken the relationship between national security officials and the press in recent years. Nor does Ignatius comment on leaks initiated by an administration and just served up to a friendly journalist. That happens sometimes, too. So Ignatius is not wrong on the facts; it’s just that he doesn’t report them all and sees no problem here. I do.

His third point is that most of the time responsible journalists don’t just go and blab all they know in the newspaper. They run what they write by officials first to make sure they are not really doing something dangerous. Ignatius guesses that Sanger knows a great deal more than he’s willing to put in a book. That’s probably right, but it still doesn’t make the whole thing smell any better than it does. And I don’t think all journalists are as punctilious about vetting their near-final drafts as Sanger probably has been. But Ignatius of the WP is not going to go all out against anyone from the NYT these days because, in partisan terms, they’re on the same side. That’s nothing new either. And it’s also something Ignatius pointedly avoids mentioning.