More Thoughts on CIA leak case

I've written a piece for the premiere issue of Conde Nast Portfolio about my role in the CIA leak case. I hope you'll take a look at it. In the piece I tried to offer some sense of what it was like inside the case for me as a witness and for Time Inc. as company. I think the case was wrought with moral ambuguity for the journalists and companies involved. Did our obligation to our confidential sources outweigh our obligation to act like other citizens who are called before grand juries? How did journalists behave when they were given this leak about Joseph Wilson's wife? I'm still proud of the original piece I co-wrote, "A War on Wilson?" which tried to cast a light on the leakers and their intentions towards Joe and Valerie Wilson. Unlike Robert Novak, who acted as a transmission belt for those who were dissing the Wilsons, I tried to show what was going on behind the scenes because I thought it was tawdry. I didn't think it was necessarily illegal but I was struck then and now by how the Bush administration, during that much-scrutinized week in July 2003, could have, at once, acknowledged Wilson's central claim--admitting that the infamous 16 words about seeking uranium in Africa should not have been in the president's 2003 State of the Union and then proceeding to trash the Ambassador publicly and, as we all now know, his wife privately. It was rank incompetance, a metaphor for the war. Had they simply thanked Wilson for his work there would have been no story? Had they stuck by the British claim about uranium, which London still does, there would have been no story. Instead they trashed Wilson and conceded his argument. And their trashing was famously goofy, from tarmacs in Africa where Ari Fleischer tried to leak to reporters to the many encounters reporters had with officials at the time. I'm sure many folks will criticize how I accorded myself during this period. Some journalists thought I was Neville Chamberlain for testifying. Others wished I had outed Karl Rove and Scooter Libby instantly. All I can say is that I tried as best I could to balance my obligations as a journalist. In the end, every reporter subpoenaed in the CIA leak case from Tim Russert to Bob Woodward to Judy Miller to me to Walter Pincus wound up testifying. We all took our own paths to get there. Bob Novak never fought his subpoena and tesified without hesitation and then played coy with his readers. Others like the great Walter Pincus wisely cut deals. Tim Russert divulged his conversation with Libby, who had called him as an irate viewer and not as a source, to the FBI and then took it back and briefly pursued a legal strategy before testifying. Still others of us worked out case through the courts. All of us took a path to the witness chair. This was mine.