Some days ago here, I cited a Jack Anderson statement that most of the things stamped Top Secret in Washington were classified not out of security concerns but because someone thought the information in question would embarrass them or expose wrongdoing. Tom Blanton elaborates on this in an article that includes this nugget…
Erwin Griswold, who as U.S. solicitor general prosecuted the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, once explained the real motivation behind government secrecy — but only years later, when he recanted his prosecutorial passion. Griswold persuaded three Supreme Court justices to vote for a prior restraint on the Times in the case. But in 1989, he confessed in a Washington Post Op-Ed article that there was no actual national security damage from the publication of the papers. "It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another," he wrote.
I think there's an awful lot wrong with the press in this country, including a lack of accuracy — for reasons of competence, quite apart from any ulterior motives. And certainly there are legitimate government secrets that should not be splashed across Page One. But I'm unconvinced that any cries we've heard to prosecute reporters for National Security Leaks are anything more than desperate ploys by folks with a vested interest in not seeing government screw-ups and corruption exposed. And that's not just a criticism of the Bush administration and its supporters. It's more common than not in Washington and politics.