That isn't to say my parsing is definitive. Far from it. All we really know is that the day one stories overstated the C.I.A.'s role by failing to mention Saudi intelligence -- and that various news organizations, having talked to various unnamed officials, are confidently offering accounts of what happened, even though some are in conflict with one another and no one really knows what precisely the C.I.A.'s role was. Why doesn't anyone just fess up to that reality?

Official secrecy doesn't actually bother me in this case. The ability to work with a double agent inside a foreign terrorist organization is exactly the sort of thing the C.I.A. can legitimately do in secret.

Here's what does bother me:

1) Misleading versions of the story being credulously reported.

2) The unnamed officials who are almost certainly engaged in sanctioned leaks. The Obama Administration ought to release all the information that is prudent on the record. As noted yesterday, information given "on background," so no individual is accountable for it, serves the political ends of the administration, not the security needs of the U.S.

I don't expect federal officials are going to change their ways anytime soon. But perhaps the media could be a bit less credulous when news breaks of a thwarted terror plot. The details that follow in the first 24 hours almost always prove incomplete at best. Shouldn't that be factored into how coverage is presented? What if newspaper reporters were to write something like the following into their stories: "Administration officials weren't willing to go on record with details, and the government has an incentive to mislead the press in various ways with its anonymously offered statements, so best to reserve judgment on what precisely happened and how much credit the C.I.A. should get. We'll do our best to nail down more details in coming days."

That is the actual truth, right?

The point isn't to deny the C.I.A. praise. Though I think its behavior is sometimes worthy of criticism -- and at times has warranted criminal prosecution -- it's also true that its agents sometimes risk their lives to do moral work that saves lives and is never acknowledged. If that isn't true in this instance, it's true in some other instance about which we've never heard. The fact remains that both the government and the press should stick to the facts when informing the public.

Self government demands good information. Or at least a greater reluctance to pass on uncertain information as if it's sound.

