What's Right.(pubication of leaks of government secrets)

Secrets Out

On the evening of December 3 last year, the Bush administration learned of an alarming leak. At midnight, the largest Muslim charity in the United States, the Holy Land Foundation of Richardson, Texas, would be formally listed as a terrorist-linked organization. Federal agents would then raid the foundation's offices and seize its papers. Now, only a dozen hours before the raid, the phone was ringing. The New York Times was on the other end of the line. Somebody had tipped them off. They intended to post the news about the foundation on their website immediately.

The organizers of the raid pleaded with the paper to postpone its report. We are dealing, they said, with some very dangerous people. Warning of the raid could jeopardize the lives of federal agents. At a minimum, the Times's leak would give the foundation time to destroy incriminating documents."Won't this be just as good a story tomorrow morning?" the Bushies asked.

Apparently not. The Times decided it was prepared to risk the lives of federal officers to have its scoop. The White House ordered an internal investigation, but the leaker was never found.

I thought of this story when I saw that Daniel Ellsberg had published a new memoir, on the eve of what may be a war with Iraq. Remember Ellsberg? He was the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, and three decades later he is still urging high officials to betray the nation's secrets to advance a political agenda.

"If people in the administration and the Pentagon can hear me, indirectly or directly," Ellsberg said in the San Francisco Chronicle on Oct. 23, "I urge them to consider . . . [,] if they know, from documents passing their hands, that the country is being deceived into a reckless war, . . . going to Congress with the documents, and to the press . . . "

Somebody must be listening to him. In July, the Times published a front-page story describing a military plan for the invasion of Iraq from the north, south, and west. At a July 22 press conference, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld vowed to find and punish the leaker. "I think it is so egregious, so terrible, that I decided to have an investigation notwithstanding the cost."