Times reporter sent to jail
A federal judge sentenced New York Times reporter Judith Miller to jail yesterday for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert CIA operative. Both Miller and Time reporter Matt Cooper had refused to testify before the grand jury about the identities of sources they spoke with during their separate investigations into the disclosure by columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent for the CIA. Publicly identifying a CIA agent is a federal crime. The judge, Thomas F. Hogan of U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., held her in contempt of court and said that "the court has to take some action to attempt to get her to comply." He added that the argument that she would never reveal the identity of her source was like a child saying, "You can spank me, but I'm still going to take that chocolate cake and eat it."
He rejected Miller's request for home detention and ordered that she be put in custody and taken to a jail in the Washington area until she changed her mind about testifying or until the grand jury expires in October.
Afterward, outside the courthouse, Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, said, "This is a chilling conclusion to an utterly confounding case. It's confounding because of the mystery about exactly what crime has been committed and what exactly the special prosecutor hopes to accomplish by the Draconian act of punishing an honorable journalist."
Cooper agreed to testify before the grand jury after his source, in an unexpected development earlier in the day, "gave me a personal, uncoerced, unambiguous waiver" to do so.
Miller read from a statement before the judge: "If journalists cannot be trusted to guarantee confidentiality, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press. The right of civil disobedience is based on personal conscience; it is fundamental to our system and it is honored throughout our history." She kept her head down as she stood up, hugged her lawyer, and was led away.
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