A Murky Case Takes a Bizarre Twist
A Times reporter goes to jail to protect a source
A year and a half after a special prosecutor began investigating who leaked the identity of a covert CIA operative, the first person has been put in jail. It was not a senior administration official, however, nor anyone else caught breaking the law for political revenge. Instead, in an odd twist, the case went from being about a politically inspired leak to defining a First Amendment privilege (or lack thereof), and the person jailed was a veteran New York Times reporter, who had been subpoenaed as a witness and refused to testify.
In a wood-paneled courtroom packed with journalists, federal Judge Thomas Hogan held Judith Miller in contempt of court, saying that if he allowed her to keep mum it would put the judicial system "on a slippery slope to anarchy." Both Miller and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper had refused to tell a grand jury who revealed to them, separately, that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent. Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, has maintained that her cover was blown in retaliation for an opinion piece he wrote for the Times questioning Bush administration assertions about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. At the 11th hour, Cooper avoided jail by agreeing to talk after his source released him from his confidentiality vow.
Miller, 57, will be incarcerated in an Alexandria, Va., detention center until she testifies or until the grand jury expires on October 28.
Ironies aplenty. The ironies in this case abound. The most glaring: that Miller didn't actually write a story based on her source's information. Plame's identity was first disclosed in a column by Robert Novak, who has refused to comment on his involvement with the investigation and has not been publicly threatened with jail time. In addition, Miller has been accused of trumpeting the alleged weapons of mass destruction threat posed by Saddam Hussein that the administration used to justify going to war in Iraq. She was widely criticized for her reporting in the fall of 2002, which relied heavily on anonymous administration sources and on discredited opposition figure Ahmad Chalabi. Ultimately, the Times ombudsman, without naming names, published an apology of sorts for the paper's "breathless stories built on unsubstantiated 'revelations' that, in many instances, were the anonymity-cloaked assertions of people with vested interests."
Other reporters have been jailed for refusing to divulge sources. The longest sentence was served by freelance author Vanessa Leggett, who spent 168 days in a lockup in 2001 for refusing to disclose information about a Houston murder case. But Miller's case represents one of the most serious confrontations between the government and the press since 1971, when the Supreme Court refused to prevent the Times and the Washington Post from publishing the secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers. It has raised new questions about whether there should be a federal shield law that protects reporters from having to provide information about confidential sources in criminal or civil court proceedings. (Thirty-one states already have some sort of shield law.) Bills introduced in both the House and the Senate would grant journalists "absolute privilege" to protect their sources.
Outside the courthouse, a somber Cooper shook his head as he said it was "a sad day not only for journalists but for our country." Earlier, his employer had, over his objections, turned over his notes and E-mails to the special prosecutor. These notes reveal that one of the government officials he talked to during the time in question was President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove. Rove has denied revealing Plame's name.
"The freest and fairest societies are not only those with independent judiciaries," Miller told the judge before he sentenced her, "but those with an independent press that works every day to keep government accountable by publishing what the government might not want the public to know."
This story appears in the July 18, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.