There is no legitimate reason for a top administration official to anonymously leak classified information to support the administration's position. You can see a case in which a top official would legitimately leak classified information to cast doubt on the administration's policy with which he disagrees, but not the other way around. The executive branch classifies information in the first place, presumably because it's not supposed to be public. If they feel that the information is important and necessary to make public in order to support their policy, they can declassify it, call a press conference, give an interview, write a paper. Or they can shut up and find another way to advance their position. What they shouldn't be able to do is have it both ways --- use classified information to wage turf wars or discredit administration critics by having the press cover their asses. And yet that's what happened. Top members of the Bush administration know they can get away with this because they believe that the chumps in the press will even go to jail rather than reveal their dirty deeds (which they went to great pains to remind the press to do.) That is "up is downism" taken to an extreme. [Emphasis added -- Ed]

This is essentially the point I was making in my earlier post about the journalist's privilege. Bush's people have learned how to game the media system entirely.

Just as the right-wing uses the media's fetish for "balance" against them, by positioning themselves in stances that are more and more extreme, thereby moving the media's perceived center, and in that way shifting the debate in a way that's not supported by the way most people actually think and feel politically in this country, just as they've learned that they can use the "he said/she said" style to legitimatize their outlandish ideological dogma, Bush's courtiers counted on reporters protecting their sources and acting as if a leak designed to smear a political opponent was functionally equivalent to a leak designed to expose government corruption or malfeasance.

With the help of reporters -- some of whom, like Woodward, should certainly know better, unlike others (such as Miller) who are ideological soulmates of the administration -- the Bush cabal has totally co-opted mechanisms designed to protect the public into yet another tool for suppressing debate and punishing their opponents. That is the reason why I did not cry for Judith Miller, and thought that Fitzgerald was correct in pursuing her until she revealed what she knew.