Ombudsman: Secrecy leaks are hot potatoes for all involved

Ombudsman: Secrecy leaks are hot potatoes for all involved
By Dave Mazzarella, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Friday, December 12, 2008

As long as there are official secrets, there will be those who will reveal them — anonymously. That distresses people in authority, but also some ordinary citizens. You may think that the media, on the other hand, would cheer. Not necessarily.

In the first place, editors have to struggle with whether the revelation is harmful to national security or overridingly in the public interest. And, secondly, they have to face running a story based on information provided by “anonymous sources.” Those two words have hung like a dark cloud over the media in recent years; newspapers raced to tighten rules on the use of unnamed sources after notoriously fake articles appeared in several publications, including The New York Times and my alma mater, USA Today.

Spc. Casey Tylek, of Camp Liberty, Iraq, is one of those who hates it when sensitive or classified information is revealed to the press anonymously. In a letter to the editor, he wrote: “All too often you read in the newspaper stories about terrorism, covert operations and national security. And these stories are quotes from people speaking on condition of anonymity, because the nature of their source of information is sensitive or not cleared to be released.”

He cited a report in September that the U.S. had been spying on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to learn what his government was up to at all times. Whoever told The Washington Post about that “should have declined comment,” Tylek said. “If you have to speak anonymously, then you shouldn’t be speaking, period.” (Supporters of the paper said that eavesdropping on the nation’s enemies was understood, but doing so on friends was highly questionable.)

Tylek isn’t alone. Sen. Christopher (Kit) Bond of Missouri and other Republican senators introduced a bill in August that would considerably broaden the prohibition against a government employee revealing classified material without authorization. A similar bill was vetoed by President Bill Clinton in 2000. Title 18 of the U.S. Code already makes it a crime to reveal secret national security information such as codes, ciphers and the like. The Bond bill would make it a crime to reveal more general types of classified information. The bill remained in committee, and I asked Bond’s aides what’s next.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=125&article=59347