Risen’s gripping affidavit

James Risen, one of The New York Times’s top national security reporters, filed an affidavit in a federal district court explaining why he refuses to comply with a subpoena demanding he give testimony that would identify his source (or sources) for a chapter in his 2006 book State of War. The chapter at question described a series of intelligence failures in the CIA’s attempts to keep tabs on Iran’s nuclear program.

And while that’s the subject of record for this leak investigation, Risen suggests in the filing that that’s not what he thinks kicked off the chain of events that has led to the government’s quest to force him to testify:

“I cannot help but think that the fact that I had written earlier, both in the Times and State of War, about the administration’s legally questionable domestic eavesdropping program, had something to do with the selective attention that was being focused on the Times and me.”

That story, of course, exposed a highly-controversial Bush administration program, won a Pulitzer, and kicked off congressional reforms of the surveillance system. Risen’s 22-page affidavit is a stirring defense of the value of his reporting, and of the need for journalists covering national security to be able to protect the confidentiality of their sources so that they may bring matters of public interest to light.