RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Bushgate

Well Judith Miller was sent to jail immediately until she testifies or until the grand jury ends it's term in October.

I have my own reasons for not shedding any tears for Ms. Judith Miller, seeing as how she was one of the main cheerleaders in the press for this war and seeing how she was passing bogus WMD info from Ahmed Chalabi to make the case for war.

From the New York Times:
New York Times Reporter Is Jailed for Keeping Source Secret

Abbreviated story from Yahoo News:

Quote:

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Judge orders reporter to jail in CIA leak case

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A judge on Wednesday sent a New York Times reporter to jail after she said she could not reveal her confidential source to a grand jury investigating the leak of a covert CIA operative's name to the media.


Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan ordered New York Times correspondent Judith Miller to jail immediately and said she must stay there until she agrees to testify or until the end of the grand jury's term in October.

Another case involving Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper was resolved when he told the judge he had just received the "expressed personal consent" of his source to reveal his identity. "Consequently I am prepared to testify," he said.

Miller told the judge she did not want to go to jail but had no choice but to protect her sources.

"If journalists cannot be trusted to keep confidences, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press," she said.

The grand jury investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, a Justice Department prosecutor, seeks to determine who in the Bush administration leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame in 2003 to the media and whether any laws were violated.

Plame's name was leaked, her diplomat husband charged, because of his criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war.

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Fearing jail time, the other reporter, Matthew Cooper is going to testify though.

From Editor & Publisher, a fairly damning editorial from Bill Israel, a UMass journalism professor who taught with Rove at the University of Texas:

Quote:

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[T]he Valerie Plame-CIA case that threatens jail time for reporters from Time and The New York Times this week is the exception that shatters the rule. In this case, journalists as a community have been played for patsies by the president's chief strategist, Karl Rove, and are enabling him to abuse the First Amendment, by their invoking it. [...]

The problem, as always, in dealing with Rove, is establishing a clear chain of culpability. Rove once described himself as a die-hard Nixonite; he is, like the former president, both student and master of plausible deniability. (This past weekend, in confirming that Rove was indeed a source for Matthew Cooper, Rove's lawyer said his client "never knowingly disclosed classified information.") That is precisely why prosecutor Fitzgerald in this case must document the pattern of Rove's behavior, whether journalists published, or not.

For in this case, Rove, improving on Macchiavelli, has bet that reporters won't rat their relationship with the administration's most important political source. How better for him to operate without constraint, or to camouflage breaking the law, than under the cover of journalists and journalism, protected by the First Amendment? [...]

Reporters with a gut fear of breaching confidential sources must fight like tigers to protect them. But neither reporters Cooper nor Miller, nor their publications, nor anyone in journalism should protect the behavior of Rove (or anyone else) through an undiscerning, blanket use of the First Amendment that weakens its protections by its gross misuse.

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Again, be aware that the informed wisdom is that Fitzgerald is working on perjury or obstruction charges -- he's not necessarily going to indict anyone as the "original leaker", but he may very well be preparing indictments against Bush administration officials who gave false testimony to the grand jury. And then there's the whole conspiracy angle which, if Rove's own testimony can be believed, could easily come into play...

It also should be noted that Cooper and especially Miller don't exactly have universal support from other journalists in their steadfast insistence that they be allowed to ignore the court's rulings. Fitzgerald's almost-but-not-quite snarky brief [PDF] to the court opposing Miller's request for house arrest draws heavily on press editorials strongly disputing the claims of journalistic privilege claimed by Cooper and Miller. It's worth a read.