Year by year, headline by headline, a trickle of news leaks on Iraq and the anti-terror campaign has grown into a steady stream of revelations, and from Pennsylvania Avenue to Downing Street, Copenhagen to Canberra, governments are responding with prosecutions.
The latest target is the New York Times. But the unfolding story begins as far back as 2003, when British weapons expert David Kelly was "outed" as the source of a story casting doubt on his government's arguments for invading Iraq, and he committed suicide. And it will go on into this fall, when Danish journalists face trial for reporting their government knew there was no evidence of banned weapons in Iraq.
In London's Central Criminal Court, too, other accused leakers will be in the dock this fall, for allegedly disclosing that US President George W. Bush talked of bombing al-Jazeera, the Arab TV station. The government threatens to prosecute newspapers that write any more about that leaked document.
Media advocates are alarmed at what they see as a mounting assault on press freedom in country after country, potentially chilling the pursuit of truth, they say, as US and European leaders pursue wars on terror and in Iraq.
"It's grotesque that at a time when political rhetoric is full of notions of democracy and liberty that we should have this fundamental right of journalists to investigate and report on public interest matters called into question," said Aidan White, general secretary of the Belgium-based International Federation of Journalists.
ENDANGERING LIVES?
But others counter that national interest lies in stopping leaks of classified information, and that some media reports endanger lives.
"We cannot continue to operate in a system where the government takes steps to counter terrorism while the media actively works to disclose those operations without any regard for protection of lives, sources and legal methods," US Senator Pat Roberts, a Republican, said in Washington in responsse to a June 23 report by the NYT and other papers detailing a US government program that taps into an international financial database to try to track terror financing.
Some Republican lawmakers called for criminal investigations of the journalists responsible and of the government insiders who leaked the information.
Editors from the Los Angeles Times and the NYT, responding to the criticism, on Saturday defended their decisions to publish government secrets.
"We weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing," wrote Dean Baquet, Los Angeles Times editor, and Bill Keller, NYT executive editor, in an op-ed piece that ran in both papers.
"There is no magic formula, no neat metric for either the public's interest or the dangers of publishing sensitive information," the piece continued. "We make our best judgment."
Investigations are already under way in other US cases. The Washington Times says the Justice Department is investigating the NYT for disclosing last year that the government was monitoring Americans' phone calls without court warrants and the Washington Post for reporting the CIA was operating secret prisons for suspected terrorists in eastern Europe.
CROSSING BORDERS
Just as the stories cross borders, so do the crackdowns.
Swiss investigators are looking for the leaker of an intelligence document attesting to that CIA prison network and are weighing criminal charges, under secrecy laws, against three journalists at the weekly SonntagsBlick who reported the story.
In Britain, revelations and retributions have filled news columns and airwaves since the US-British invasion of Iraq in 2003, when the BBC, citing an unnamed government source, reported that allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction now known to have been false -- had been "sexed up."
In July that year, bioweapons expert David Kelly informed superiors he was the BBC's source. His identity was disclosed and he was compelled to testify before two parliamentary committees. Within days, Kelly killed himself.
In 2004 and last year, at London's Daily Telegraph and then at the Times, Michael Smith reported on leaked memos from Prime Minister Tony Blair's government indicating the Bush administration was long committed to invading Iraq, and weapons intelligence was "fixed" around that aim. Smith says he has been investigated, but neither he nor any leaker has been charged.
For David Keogh, a former British Cabinet Office spokesman, and Leo O'Connor, an ex-parliament aide, the outcome was different.
Both men are charged over the alleged leaking of a classified memo about a Bush-Blair meeting in 2004 at which Blair was said to have argued against a Bush suggestion of bombing al-Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar. They face up to two years in prison if convicted.
After London's Daily Mirror reported on that memo last November, Britain's attorney general warned other editors they could face prosecution if they divulged any more of the leaked document.
ELSEWHERE
Michael Bjerre and Jesper Larsen of Berlingske Tidene, a major Danish daily, also face two years in prison at their trial this fall -- the first such prosecution of journalists in Denmark's modern history.
They reported in 2004 that, before joining the Iraq invasion, the Danish government was told by military intelligence that there was no firm evidence of banned weapons in Iraq. The Danish leaker was convicted and jailed for four months last year.
Two journalists in Romania face up to seven years in prison for possessing classified documents about the Romanian military's operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though their papers never published the information.
A German parliamentary report May 26 disclosed that Berlin's foreign intelligence agency had been illegally spying on German journalists since the 1990s to find the sources of leaks.
De Telegraaf, the Netherlands' biggest paper, had to go to court to win a ruling last month ordering the Dutch secret service to stop wiretapping calls of two reporters who obtained leaked information about official corruption.
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