NY Times reporter refuses to testify to grand jury

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – New York Times reporter Judith
Miller refused on Wednesday to reveal her sources to a grand
jury investigating the leak of a covert CIA operative’s name
but Time correspondent Matthew Cooper agreed to testify.

Miller said 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.

Cooper, who has refused in the past to name his sources in
highly charged journalism case, told Chief U.S. District Judge
Thomas Hogan that he had received “expressed personal consent”
to reveal his identity.

“Consequently I am prepared to testify,” he told the judge.
Time had said last week it would give up Cooper’s notes that it
held.

The 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.

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