The Times faces a real freedom of the press test

While Judy Miller was making a mockery of defending press freedomes in this country -- and Bill Miller was forced, with increasing reluctance, to defend her -- the Times has a real reporter in all likelihood looking at the prospect of spending ten years or more in a Chinese jail.

Once a muckraking journalist who exposed official corruption and wrote about the abuses endured by farmers, Mr. Zhao started working in the Times's office in Beijing in April 2004. He was arrested on Sept. 17, after state security agents tracked him to a Pizza Hut in Shanghai. Agents had targeted him after a high-level investigation was ordered in response to the article in The Times about Mr. Jiang.

That article, written by Mr. Kahn, cited two anonymous sources in reporting Mr. Jiang's resignation offer. (Mr. Jiang later did resign the military post.) The Times has said that neither source was Mr. Zhao. Indeed, according to a confidential state security report, the key piece of evidence is a photocopy of a handwritten note that Mr. Zhao wrote to Mr. Kahn two months before the publication of the article.

The note describes some jockeying between Mr. Jiang and Mr. Hu over military appointments. Mr. Kahn later included a reference to such jockeying as background material in one of the final paragraphs in the Sept. 7 article.

A central question is how state security agents obtained the photocopy. The original note remains in the Times office in Beijing, suggesting either that agents entered the office without permission or enlisted someone to help them make a copy. In either instance, the note should be inadmissible under Chinese law, legal experts say.

Now that the case is coming to "trial," perhaps the punditocracy will break their silence over Zhao's situation. Wishful thinking, I suppose, since he doesn't regularly lunch with the Bobs Novak or Woodward.