It’s hard to know how to come down on the dispute between CBS and the military over prosecutors’ subpoena of interview outtakes regarding the Haditha incident. The New York Times sums it up:

In February, the government issued a subpoena for a videotape of the “60 Minutes” interview, portions of which were broadcast in March 2007. Government lawyers are trying to assess whether Sergeant Wuterich said anything in the parts of the interview that were not broadcast that would be pertinent to their case. CBS declined to share its news-gathering material and called the request “unreasonable and oppressive.”
In February, siding with CBS, a military judge quashed the subpoena, but the Court of Criminal Appeals ruled last week that the judge had been wrong to do so. The appeals court directed the judge to conduct “additional fact-finding,” including a private review of the videotape, to determine if the parts of the interview that were not broadcast were “relevant and necessary” to the sergeant’s prosecution.

Anything that smacks of creating special privileges for the professional media is to be resisted, and CBS is apparently trying to make a First Amendment case out of this rather than a simple case of contesting an unreasonable subpoena. CBS should enjoy the same ability to contest a subpoena as any other party — and nothing more. That’s the long-term view.

The short-term view is that the prosecutors are very likely conducting some sort of fishing expedition here, since their media/politics-driven Haditha prosecutions have come to approximately naught. It’s not a popular thing to write, but the case against the Haditha suspects has at times looked a lot more like persecution than prosecution. And if the best the prosecutors can hope for is that a sergeant may have said something embarrassing in a 60 Minutes interview, that doesn’t seem to indicate that they have an airtight, ironclad case with a satin bow on top of it. It’s interesting, too, that the military judge took CBS’s side here against the prosecution.