Decent journalists everywhere will delight at the vindication of Ed Moloney's refusal to surrender notes of his interview with William Stobie to the Stevens inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane. Journalists in any conflict zone could never function at all if the often confidential material they gathered were to be made available to the state or other bodies.
But the issue is not simple. Will the forces which rallied to Ed Moloney gather equally behind Toby Harnden, the Irish correspondent to The Daily Telegraph, who interviewed two paratroopers present during Bloody Sunday? Rather than make whatever unpublished material he has available to the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday, he has destroyed all records of the interviews. He is now threatened with contempt proceedings; is his right to protect his sources not as important as Ed Moloney's?
The state has duties other than those of shielding the freedom of the press. We who have toiled in the vineyards of terrorist war should accept that the rights of journalists to conceal their secret knowledge against state-investigation actually exist only in those virtuous lands where people are not regularly murdered.
Life or death
Elsewhere, why should the state guard the rights of journalists when the information they privately possess could be a matter of life or death of its citizens?
This doesn't mean that journalists should hand over what they know to the state: but it does mean that they might have to go to jail for not disclosing what they know. There could well be occasions when both the imprisoning state and the imprisoned journalist are simply doing their bounden duty in the mutually contradictory courses they have taken.
For journalists can have power over life and death in what they see or know. I once saw a British army foot patrol approach an IRA ambush in Belfast. I didn't warn the soldiers, both for safety reasons and because I didn't feel it was my business to do so. Two soldiers were shot down before my eyes, one of them almost certainly killed. Even aside from issues of self-preservation, can anyone say, beyond any doubt, that what I did - i.e. nothing - was absolutely right? Yet on the other hand, if I had done something, might I not have caused the death of one of the ambushers?
The issue might seem clearcut to you. Good. I wish I had your clarity of thought and, moreover, your clarity of conscience. Try this one. In 1973, a friend of mine, a West Belfast Catholic, saw two postmen shot dead on the Falls Road. A year later, he was in my house browsing through a copy of the UVF's magazine Combat.
Suddenly he went white, and started shaking: the hairs on his arms stood on end. "That's him," he said. "That's the man who did the shooting."
Actual gunman
He pointed at a photograph of three UVF/Red Hand Commando prisoners inside Long Kesh. One of the men was Winston Churchill Rea, the driver who was convicted in connection with the killings. Standing beside him was the actual gunman, in jail on other charges.
What could I do about this? On the one hand, here was a man who had cold-bloodedly butchered two harmless Catholics and who deserved to be in jail for the rest of his life. On the other, the only reason I knew this was because as a journalist I had a copy of Com- bat, without which my friend would never have seen the photograph. Neither he nor I knew the man's name. All I had to do was to hand the copy of Combat to the security forces with the information I now had.
I chose not to do so. Last March, a loyalist was shot dead by fellow loyalists in West Belfast. His name was Frankie Curry, the killer - as I now know - whose face had appeared in Combat. After his brief imprisonment on intimidation charges back in the 1970s, he went on to be a driving force in loyalist paramilitarism, organising killings and himself killing at least three more people. So: how many people died because I stayed silent?
Difficult judgements
Thus the right of a journalist to keep information to himself is not without price. Judgements are difficult to make, and under the diseased and emotional pressure of violence, it is easy to come to the wrong one. During this same period, I was given a posed photograph of two British army soldiers, intelligence officers, which had been taken in the home of their friend, the UVF leader Jim Hanna. They were cheerfully pointing guns at the photographer, Hanna himself.
I published the soldiers' pictures and names in the now extinct magazine Hibernia; I knew much more about them, such as their home addresses, which I did not disclose lest the information be of use to the IRA. At the time, I had a clear conscience, but I didn't do what I should have done: which was to tell the British army in advance what I was about to disclose. In those mad watches before dawn, I have often thought: had those two soldiers been working undercover at the time I published their pictures, I would have brought about their terrible and certain deaths.
Journalism in war is full of moral choices; and all of them are wrong.