Without leaks, truth dries up

During the 32 years I covered Washington for the Los Angeles Times, I learned that leaks from anonymous sources are crucial to informing the public. In the debate over what Karl Rove said when and to whom, and over the role of confidential sources in general, that must be underlined: Without leaks, without anonymity for some sources, a free press loses its ability to act as a check and a balance against the power of government.

The stories that have depended on confidential sources, and often on classified information, are legend: Watergate in the Nixon administration, the Iran/Contra scandal and cover-up in the Reagan administration, and President Clinton's lies in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

More recently, leaks aided The Times' investigations of the Environmental Protection Agency's plan to ease up on mercury emissions, dissent within the CIA and the State Department over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the alarming number of Army officers quitting after duty in Iraq.

It sounds good to say that classified information must stay classified. But even government officials have acknowledged that it's necessary to dispense classified information from time to time.

In 2000, after Congress passed a piece of legislation tightening the law against classified leaks, Clinton vetoed the measure at the urging of some of his aides. They explained they could not properly brief reporters under the law because such a huge amount of important information is classified, even though much of it involves no national security risk.

Kenneth Bacon, Clinton's Pentagon spokesman, told reporters the bill would be "disastrous" for journalists and for "any official who deals with the press in national security."

All of this is especially important when it comes to the Bush administration, which is notoriously secretive. Over the last five years, the government has more than doubled the number of classified documents. Millions of additional documents have been marked "sensitive" or "for official use only." Also, President Bush rarely holds a news conference, further limiting the public's access to information.

His administration, however, doesn't hesitate to leak classified information when it suits its purpose. The Valerie Plame case is Exhibit A. Her identity as a CIA agent was leaked in an obvious attempt to undermine her husband, Joe Wilson, who had written a New York Times Op-Ed article debunking Bush's claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.