Apparently the public doesn't have a right to know.

That's the lesson that will be learned from Tuesday's federal appeals court decision announcing "there is no First Amendment privilege protecting journalists ... from testifying ... or otherwise providing evidence ... regardless of any confidence promised by the reporter to any source."  But reading further into the decision, it only got worse.

Just a few pages after the three judges emphatically and unanimously told the journalists they were "wrong" to argue that the freedom of the press provided them with any privilege of confidentiality for their news sources, the judges went even further.  The judges asserted that even "if there is any such privilege, ... it has been overcome."  And, according to the decision, the reasons why the reporters lost that hypothetical privilege could be found further back in a separate opinion.

Turn, turn, turn.  There it was, the court's purported explanation of how the special prosecutor had "met his burden of demonstrating that the information" sought from the journalists' confidential sources was "both critical and unobtainable from" anyone other than the press: blank page after blank page after blank page, dutifully marked "REDACTED."

For the lawyers who briefed the case and the journalists being defended, this was far from a surprise.  The subpoenas issued to the two reporters and the news magazine came from a federal grand jury led by a special prosecutor investigating whether someone in the government had leaked the identity of an undercover CIA operative, Valerie Plame.  The revelation of Ms. Plame's other life came to light first in an op-ed column penned by Robert Novak, but other stories suggested that Novak was not the only journalist tipped off to Ms. Plame's clandestine career by someone allegedly on the "inside."  Hence, the prosecutorial inquisition aimed at multiple members of the fourth estate.

From its very beginning, the Plame investigation, including the goings on of the grand jury, has been shrouded in secrecy -- which, in fairness, is not so unusual.  What did raise eyebrows, however, was the targeting of the news media.

It is standard operating procedure for the government to avoid using journalists as investigatory tools in its prosecutorial arsenal.  In fact, the U.S. Department of Justice has an internal rule cautioning prosecutors not to subpoena the press except as a last resort.  But in the Plame investigation, that common practice turned out to be meaningless.

It was not just one member of the press who received a subpoena, it was many.  And, when those journalists pleaded confidentiality under the First Amendment, the prosecutor sought to make them talk with the threat of jail time.

What's more, when the prosecutor asked the court to cite the reporters for contempt, most of his arguments were made in secret -- filed under seal to protect the confidentiality of his investigation.  No one could see what the prosecutor had done to avoid the very real problem of using the press as an arm of his criminal investigation.  Not the journalists facing contempt charges, not their defense lawyers, not the public -- no one except the prosecutor bringing the charges and the judges who would decide not only whether the reporters could keep their sources confidential but also whether the cost for doing so was going to jail.

With Tuesday's appellate decision, now two courts and four judges have agreed with these tactics, going so far as to seal and redact the portions of their decisions that discuss the secrets of the Plame investigation submitted by the prosecutor.

It is more than a little ironic that, in essence, these judges have ruled that prosecutors have an absolute right to keep their investigations secret while the journalists enjoy no privilege at all to protect their confidential sources.  As Judith Miller, one of the subpoenaed reporters said in the aftermath of the decision: "My strategy is to tell anyone who will listen that this is not about me, this about their right to know. ... I risk going to jail ... for reasons a court won't explain."  Lesson learned.