From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

When a big story based on a leak hits the news,

it's always instructive to figure out who leaked it and why.

But it's the one bit of context that the writers of the stories simply cannot provide lest they burn their sources.

That's why those key bits of information often fail to go beyond the whispers of Washington drawing rooms. Such is the case with

many of the revelations in the past few weeks about the failure to detect terrorist activity

leading up to September 11th. The latest big development was the Newsweek story about the CIA's failure

to adequately track the men believed to be September 11th conspirators. Joining us now is Will Salatin,

who is Slate's chief political correspondent. Will, welcome back to O'Tem. Thanks, happy to be here.

All right, let's start with the Newsweek story. Who do you believe leaked this to Michael Lissacoff?

Well, it's not too hard to figure out that the driving force behind this leak is the FBI.

And that's because for the past several weeks, the FBI has been on the griddle for failing to anticipate what happened on September 11th.

So they needed to put somebody else under the

heat and they just leaked something, I presume, which turns out to be a story suggesting that the

CIA had information which could have prevented September 11th. So it's basically an attempt

to let somebody else sit on the hot seat for a while. Can we equally presume that some of the stories that reflected poorly

on the FBI had been leaked by the CIA to get some egg off of its face? That's harder to tell

because the retaliatory leak is much easier to spot. You know who's been on the hot seat,

and then you can start reading the code words in the story. Whenever you see a story

that refers to counterterrorism officials, phrases like that, you can start narrowing down who the

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