Carol Marin Takes on Fitzgerald

Reporter Carol Marin takes on Fitzgerald:

my own experience with the federal government continues to color my view of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's relentless pursuit of reporters, their notes and their sources in the current investigation of whether someone in the White House leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

In the current climate, it would be understandable if you did not care at all about any of this. After all, this has been one of the most shameful seasons for journalists and journalism, in my memory.

The Jayson Blair fiasco at the New York Times. The Bush administration's payoffs to columnist Armstrong Williams and other news professionals who were more than willing, in exchange, to be co-opted into promoting government programs. The failure of the press in general to ask real, hard, probing questions about why we should go to war with Iraq. The willingness by too many in the Fourth Estate, Judith Miller chief among them, to buy into the government's claims of the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a predicate for that war.

To defend Miller at this stage feels a little like the ACLU must have felt in defending the neo- Nazi's right of assembly in Skokie years ago. It's not pretty. But there is a freedom of the press principle worth fighting for even if the individual or individuals in question are objectionable.

Let's remember that you and I still don't know exactly why Miller was ordered by the court to go to jail. That's because the written opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals District of Columbia No. 04-3138 contains six-blank pages, 72-78. The information on those pages has been redacted at the request of U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald, citing national security concerns. That level of secrecy in a court ruling has stunned constitutional lawyers.

The story gets more interesting.