PressEthic

I.Lewis Libby is establishing a fund to pay his legal defense, Judith Miller has resigned from The New York Times and the press is coming down on Cheney like a ton of bricks. The fall-out of the previous, who leaked the information to the press fiasco is not even resolved, and we have a second problem.

The Washington Post claimed in a recent article that the CIA has a covert prison network in Eastern Europe, where it is detaining terrorism suspects, and opened up a whole new can of worms. Now the CIA, along with some Republican leaders wants an investigation to reveal the source of this leak.

Jack Shafer of Slate had a few choice words to say about this proposed investigation.

They're not concerned with the administration's concealment of the system from nearly all members of Congress charged with oversight of the CIA's covert operations. They don't want to be bothered to scrutinize the legality of a network of jails that holds terrorists and terrorist suspects in perpetuity and in secret. And they don't seem to care that the administration may have encouraged foreign nations to violate the international human rights treaty, which the United States has signed and which prohibits such jails. No, Frist and Hastert want the leakers unmasked.

The issue is two-fold at the moment. Do these prisons exist, and if they do who told the press about them? It will be interesting to find out how both these issues are handled in the near future. Although, Shafer doesn’t feel that this has the potential to turn into yet another media circus, he has safeguarded himself nevertheless.

But if my crystal ball weren't in hock, I'd predict that Frist and Hastert's call for a leak query was a one- or two-day media stunt designed to deflect attention from the scope and scale of the administration's black sites. Now that they've made their noise, they won't bring it up again. However, I do reserve the right to deny ever having written this column when and if Congress jails Dana Priest on contempt charges for refusing to answer questions about her sources.