 "The
freest and fairest societies are not only those with independent
judiciaries, but those with an independent press that works every day
to keep government accountable by publishing what the government might
not want the public to know."
That was the statement that NYT
reporter Judith Miller read to the judge as she was convicted of
contempt of court and sent to jail yesterday, where she will remain
until she either breaks her oath of confidentiality over the name of
her source of information on the infamous Valerie Plame leak, or until
Bush's grand jury which is demanding that breach finishes its work,
probably at the end of this year.
Miller, whose journalistic history is uneven, is a hero. While many
countries and most American states have laws protecting a journalist's
right not to reveal their sources, American grand juries have a history
of trampling on civil liberties in their often-ideological zeal to
reveal 'the truth'. Such juries are truly frightening to those of us
who live in real democracies, because their power is virtually
unlimited, and they are not bound by the constitution or by any
standards of reasonableness or common decency. They are vestiges of the
regimes that have given us inquisitions, McCarthyist witch hunts, and
reckless, power-crazed organizations like Nazi brownshirts and the US
Homeland Security thugs, and, more recently, the 'outsourced torture'
chambers of the third world and Guantanamo. Absolute power corrupts
absolutely, and that is what is wrong with 'grand juries'.
Why is the right of a journalist not to reveal their sources so
important, such a bedrock provision of any true democracy? Because
whistleblowers, the kind that bring down corrupt regimes like Richard
Nixon's and Enron's, will only dare to confront fraud, corruption and
even greater atrocities committed by those with wealth and power, if
there is some reasonable chance of protection for them, some balancing
of power so that they aren't automatically thrown to the very lions
whose crimes they are revealing. History is full of the stories of
martyrs who died trying to reform corrupt organizations, and one of the
objectives of democracy is to eliminate the need for such martyrdom,
and to enlist the media as an additional check against abuse of power
and untrammeled corruption. In most of the third world, whistleblowers
risk, and often lose, their lives -- and often their sacrifices are in
vain, only emboldening the abusers further when they realize their
impunity.
It is for that reason that compelling journalists to reveal their
sources violates a number of international laws, including those of the
OAS,
of which the US is a member, but as we have seen repeatedly from the
Bush administration, the current US government considers itself above
and not bound by international law. They play right into tyants' hands
wordwide when these tyrants can point out that the world's only
superpower and self-proclaimed defender of democracy routinely ignores
the law when it is not perceived to be in its self-interest.
But even in the West, whistleblowers usually regret their decision to be good citizens and report wrong-doing. As I reported in an earlier article,
whistleblowers often face skepticism and ostracism from their own
friends and co-workers, huge legal bills, armies of opposing lawyers,
intimidation, threats, loss of job, and destruction of their
livelihoods and families. The deck is stacked against them, whether
they confront public or private-sector wrongdoing. The actions of the
current grand jury will be the last straw -- no whistleblower will risk
losing their confidentiality to a grand jury, and no reporter will risk
long prison sentences simply for honoring a promise of confidence. It's
another dark day for American democracy.
For examples of the type of critical work that whistleblowers do, see the Government Accountability Project and the National Whistleblower Center.
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