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NY Times Reporter Judith Miller Jailed

Posted on: Thursday, 7 July 2005, 21:00 CDT

WASHINGTON: A New York Times reporter was jailed on Wednesday (local time) after she said she could not break her promise and reveal her confidential source to a grand jury investigating who in the Bush administration leaked a covert CIA operative's name to the media.

Chief US District Judge Thomas Hogan ordered correspondent Judith Miller to jail immediately and said she must stay there until she agreed to testify or for the rest of the grand jury's term, which lasts through October.

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

The dispute has become an important case involving freedom of the press. It has pitted the news media's traditional use of anonymous sources against the efforts of a federal government prosecutor to investigate a possible crime.

Miller told the judge she did not want to go to jail but had no choice but to protect the identity of her source as a matter of personal conscience and to stand up for a vigorous, independent press.

"If journalists cannot be trusted to keep confidences, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press," she said in a clear, firm voice in the packed courtroom that included her husband and the newspaper's top editor.

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 covert CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media in 2003 and whether any laws were violated.

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

Journalists say using anonymous sources is crucial to their reporting, including exposing government wrongdoing in cases like the Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon's presidency and the printing of the "Pentagon Papers on the Viet Nam War."

When Hogan ordered Miller to jail, she showed no emotion, and one of her lawyers put his arm around her shoulder.

The judge said confinement at a jail in the Washington, DC, area might convince her to change her mind and testify.

Source: China Daily; North American ed.

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