Visiting Professor Gets no Jail time

By BARNEY BRANTINGHAM

I like and respect South Coast journalist Ann Louise Bardach and would have hated to see her go to prison. I would even have visited her if the slammer weren't too far away.

See, the feds had been hammering Bardach for her files from an interview with a Cuban fugitive, and she had been resisting.

Was she headed for the same prison cell occupied by New York Times reporter Judith Miller?

The situation was "perilous," Bardach, a UCSB visiting professor, told me.

The federal Department of (In)Justice subpoenaed all tapes, notes and whatever from her 1998 New York Times interview with Luis Posada Carriles, in which he admitted masterminding bombing of tourist sites in Cuba.

He's a "fugitive militant, would-be assassin of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and prison escapee who is wanted by Venezuela for the 1976 shootdown of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 civilians," Bardach wrote in an April 17 Washington Post story.

But Bardach had something in her favor that Miller didn't have. That's the Florida shield law that protects journalists from having to turn over notes, tapes and the like. Unfortunately for Miller, there's no federal shield law.

The Times fought the subpoenas in federal court, arguing that the information was already publicly available. As a result, Bardach won a major victory Monday. The feds finally agreed to quash the subpoena, but not before the FBI showed up at Bardach's Carpinteria-area house sniffing for info, a big surprise to her actor husband, Robert Lesser.

"This was a rare First Amendment victory," Bardach told me. She could have been found in contempt for refusing to turn over the items. Miller has been behind bars since refusing to identify the source (she never wrote a story) she talked to about the now-famous outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, involving White House aide Karl Rove.

In her Post story, Bardach pointed out that despite the U.S. "war on terrorism," Posada, 77, managed to slip into Miami in March with a bogus passport, despite being on an immigration watch list. Instead of being arrested, he asked for asylum.

But all this attention got a bit too embarrassing and the feds finally arrested Posada on immigration charges. He's behind bars awaiting an Aug. 29 asylum-deportation hearing.

And Bardach isn't in danger of being Miller's cellmate, for now anyway.