CURRENTS
Al Qaeda's Computer
A recent New York Law Journal column by James C. Goodale, ex-chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, severely criticized The Wall Street Journal for passing along to U.S. intelligence officials hidden al Qaeda computer files it found in Kabul, and for reporting that it did so in two front-page articles. Goodale argued that the juxtaposition of those articles and the assassination of the Journal reporter Daniel Pearl only days later “at least raises questions to what extent, if any, the press should assist the war against terrorism.” “The line between what the state does and what the press does,” Goodale wrote, “should be as bright, if not brighter, than the line between church and state.” It is a principle that journalists certainly would endorse, but as we shall see, is not always simple to follow.
The more than 1,750 al Qaeda computer files that came into the Journal’s possession contained communications between the terrorist organization’s leaders from 1997 to the fall of 2001 and, among other things, a remarkably detailed account of its agent Abdul Ra’uff’s travels in Israel and Egypt in search of terrorist targets. Ra’uff’s itinerary matched that of the would-be shoe bomber, Richard C. Reid, the British citizen whose alleged later effort to blow up an American airliner was thwarted by the passengers and crew. U.S. officials who reviewed the files are convinced that Ra’uff and Reid are the same person.
The Journal’s exclusive articles about the al Qaeda files were written by staff reporters Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins based on information stored in two computers that had been looted from an abandoned al Qaeda office. The computers wound up in the hands of a local dealer who sold them for $1,100 to Cullison, who was in the market for a laptop because his own had been destroyed when a Northern Alliance truck in which he was riding overturned.
Seven days after the second Journal article appeared, Pearl, who had been investigating the connection between the alleged shoe bomber and al Qaeda, was kidnapped and later killed by terrorists. His assassins claimed they kidnapped him because he was a CIA agent, a claim entirely without foundation. But here’s the rub. Several years ago, the CIA admitted that it used willing journalists as its agents in the cold war. Worse, the late William Colby, a CIA director, once confided to a reporter friend of mine, Stanley Karnow, that several major news organizations actually were complicit in helping the CIA plant agents posing as reporters in their overseas bureaus. To this day, the CIA has refused to make clear that it no longer uses reporters as agents or agents posing as reporters, a practice that not only endangers the credibility of the press but also puts U.S. journalists — like Pearl — at risk.
I asked the Journal’s managing editor, Paul E. Steiger, why the newspaper decided to give government officials the computer files and go public with the fact that it had. He said that they needed confirmation that the files were legitimate, and they hoped the government could help them get at the encrypted files more quickly, in case the files contained plans for another terrorist attack. “If we could not decode them on time and attacks were carried out successfully,” Steiger said, “we could never look at ourselves in the mirror again.”
Steiger said he was concerned at the time about remaining independent from the government, but not about possible retribution against his staff. “We realized the information in our possession had the potential to be very serious,” he said. “We decided the risk was sufficiently great to make contacting government officials not only appropriate but also necessary.” Steiger concedes that “it is possible, though extremely doubtful” that Pearl was killed because of the Journal stories. “More likely it was simply because he was an American and a journalist . . . . But our job is to publish what is important.”
In his Law Journal column, Goodale concluded that The Wall Street Journal had no real need to share the al Qaeda files with government officials, because, like the Pentagon Papers, the files were merely dated “reference documents” indicating where al Qaeda had been and what it had done, rather than current information that could affect public safety or military operations.
After hearing Steiger’s explanation, Goodale — a former general counsel for The New York Times and a key supporter of its decision to publish the Pentagon Papers — did not change his mind. He e-mailed me, “If the WSJ was worried there might be plans in the computer they should have turned it over to the government and forgotten about it. No matter what, they should not have published that they cooperated with the government . . . . I will say flat out what the WSJ did is detrimental to the safety of U.S. journalists abroad.”
In this case, I stand with Steiger. Concern for reporters’
safety, as vital as it must be, cannot trump the need to report
a critically important story. Steiger and his colleagues asked
themselves the right questions and made the tough decision to
publish, including the decision to reveal that government officials
reviewed the material and verified its authenticity. No journalist
wants to freely turn over information to the government. But the
“bright line” that separates press and state can at
times be terribly pale and fuzzy.
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