Jail for all the wrong reasons

Judith Miller in cursor.org parody photo referring to her tendency to print dubious WMD intelligence from Ahmed Chalabi, Bush's favorite iraqi exile before the war and allegation he now spys for Iran.

Yesterday the Supreme Court refused to hear appeals about the most important Freedom of the Press case in recent memory. It appears very likely that two reporters, the New York Times' Judith Miller and Time's Matt Cooper, are heading to jail for refusing to tell a federal prosecutor who told them that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. The informant was almost certainly a Bush Administration hack trying to smear Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, who had recently gone public with doubts about iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The cases are ironic to the point of parody. Judith Miller never even wrote an article. Matt Cooper's article in Time criticized the Bush Administration for engineering the leak. These were the responsible journalists and they're the ones going to jail? Robert Novak, the journalist who actually did out Plame's CIA employment, is not under investigation or under threat of jail. Observers think that the federal prosecutor actually knows the identity of the informant but as of this date, this person hasn't been charged.

It's not an easy case. I frequently questioned Judith Miller's shoddy reporting during this time. She relied on shady off-the-record public officials way too much. She never heard a weapons of mass destruction story she didn't believe. She was guilable and time has proven she was wrong. Good reporting consists of more than sitting around a White House water cooler and printing the spin from the bottom-feeding political hacks trying to get a story in the Times. But she is a reporter for a major paper. She's done a lot of good work. She shouldn't go to jail simply for talking to someone. Sometimes those shady conversations in White House basements do lead to important journalism and we need to protect that.

And in all the court manoeuvrings we're forgetting that someone exposed a CIA agent, her undercover assignments and her network of on-the-ground informers, all to play politics in Washington. Someone very near the White House committed treason. Shouldn't that be the big story?

Update:

Apparently Matt Cooper's notes indicate that Presidential right-hand man Karl Rove is one of the sources behind the leak.