July 7, 2005
Reporter Jailed After Refusing to Name Source

By ADAM LIPTAK (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ADAM%20LIPTAK&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ADAM%20LIPTAK&inline=nyt-per)
WASHINGTON, July 6 - Judith Miller, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, was sent to jail on Wednesday after a federal judge declared that she was "defying the law" by refusing to divulge the name of a confidential source.

Another reporter who faced jail in the case, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, was spared after announcing a last-minute deal with a confidential source that he said would allow him to testify before a grand jury.

Before being taken into custody by three court officers, Ms. Miller said she could not in good conscience violate promises to her sources. "If journalists cannot be trusted to guarantee confidentiality," she told Judge Thomas F. Hogan, "then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press."

Judge Hogan held the two reporters in civil contempt in October for refusing to cooperate with a federal prosecutor's investigation into the disclosure of the identity of a covert operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. The prosecutor's efforts produced the most serious confrontation between the government and the press since the Pentagon Papers case in 1971. The Supreme Court refused to hear appeals from the reporters last week.

On hearing Mr. Cooper's statement, Judge Hogan indicated he would lift the contempt sanction against Mr. Cooper after he testified.

After listening to Ms. Miller, the judge ordered her sent to "a suitable jail within the metropolitan area of the District of Columbia" until she decided to talk or until the term of the grand jury expired in October.

"I have a person in front of me," Judge Hogan said, "who is defying the law."

Ms. Miller appeared shaken and scared as she left the courtroom. In a telephone interview later in the evening, she said she had been taken to the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia.

Ms. Miller, who conducted interviews but never wrote an article about the C.I.A. operative, joins a line of journalists who have accepted jail time rather than betray their sources' confidences. That tradition, according to Judge Hogan, does not deserve respect.

"That's the child saying: 'I'm still going to take that chocolate chip cookie and eat it. I don't care,' " the judge said.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, disagreed.

"The law presented Judy with the choice between betraying a trust to a confidential source or going to jail," Mr. Keller said after the hearing. "The choice she made is a brave and principled choice, and it reflects a valuing of individual conscience that has been part of this country's tradition since its founding."

On Friday, saying it was obligated to comply with a final court order in the case, Time turned over Mr. Cooper's notes and other documents to the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

At the hearing here Wednesday, Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer for Time, said Time's move should obviate the need for Mr. Cooper's testimony.

Mr. Fitzgerald opposed that request. "Mr. Cooper's testimony is essential," he said. "We need to get this right one way or the other, and we need Mr. Cooper to testify."

Judge Hogan rejected Time's request that he excuse Mr. Cooper from testifying. Indeed, the judge said, the reporters' failure to cooperate, until now a civil matter, may be considered criminal conduct.

"It could be seen to be obstruction of justice," Judge Hogan said.

Mr. Cooper then spoke directly to the judge, reading from a statement.

He said he had awoken Wednesday morning certain that he would continue to be in contempt and had said goodbye to his 6-year-old son. Time's actions, he said, did not absolve him from a promise he had made to his source. He added that a waiver form that his source had signed months ago did not affect his thinking.

Investigators have presented many government officials with waiver forms instructing journalists to ignore pledges of confidentiality. Mr. Cooper, Ms. Miller and other journalists have said they view such waivers as coerced and ineffective.

Mr. Cooper said his situation had changed earlier in the day.

"A short time ago, in somewhat dramatic fashion, I received an express, personal release from my source," Mr. Cooper said. "It's with a bit of surprise and no small amount of relief that I will comply with this subpoena."

Mr. Cooper's decision to drop his refusal to testify followed discussions on Wednesday morning among lawyers representing Mr. Cooper and Karl Rove, the senior White House political adviser, according to a person who has been officially briefed on the case. Mr. Fitzgerald was also involved in the discussions, the person said.

In his statement in court, Mr. Cooper did not name Mr. Rove as the source about whom he would now testify, but the person who was briefed on the case said that he was referring to Mr. Rove and that Mr. Cooper's decision came after behind-the-scenes maneuvering by his lawyers and others in the case.

Those discussions centered on whether a legal release signed by Mr. Rove last year was meant to apply specifically to Mr. Cooper, who by its terms would be released from any pledge of confidentiality he had made to Mr. Rove, the person said. Mr. Cooper said in court that he had agreed to testify only after he had received an explicit waiver from his source.

Richard A. Sauber, a lawyer for Mr. Cooper, said he would not discuss whether Mr. Cooper was referring to Mr. Rove nor would they comment on discussions leading up to Mr. Cooper's decision. Mr. Fitzgerald's policy is to refuse to respond to inquiries about the case.

Mr. Rove declined to comment on Wednesday.

In recent days, a lawyer for Mr. Rove has said that Mr. Cooper and Mr. Rove had a conversation not long before the name of the operative first became public. News articles referred to the operative by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, although she now goes by her married name, Valerie Wilson.

Mr. Cooper's involvement in the matter dates back two years, when he and two other reporters wrote an article for Time.com (http://Time.com).

The article said "some administration officials" had told Time and the syndicated columnist Robert Novak that "Valerie Plame is a C.I.A. official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

The article also noted that she is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who had recently written an opinion article in The New York Times questioning one of the rationales, concerning Iraq's weapons program, offered by the Bush administration for the Iraq war. Mr. Wilson based his criticism on a trip he had taken to Niger for the C.I.A.

On July 14, 2003, Mr. Novak wrote: "Valerie Plame is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me his wife suggested sending Wilson to Niger."

The Time article, published three days after Mr. Novak's column, suggested that the officials had "declared war" on Mr. Wilson and had released the information about his wife as a form of payback or in an effort to undermine the seriousness of his criticism.

Mr. Sauber said Mr. Cooper's agreement to testify was limited to a single conversation with a single source.

Reporters from The Washington Post and NBC testified after similar releases. Mr. Novak has refused on numerous occasions to discuss whether he provided information to Mr. Fitzgerald.

In her statement in court, Ms. Miller said she had received no similar permission from her sources.

"Your Honor," she said, "in this case I cannot break my word just to stay out of jail. The right of civil disobedience based on personal conscience is fundamental to our system and honored throughout our history."

She noted that she had covered the war in Iraq, and had lived and worked all over the world.

"The freest and fairest societies are not only those with independent judiciaries," she said, "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."

Because Ms. Miller did not write about the Plame matter, it is not known precisely why Mr. Fitzgerald focused on her. But the prosecutor could have learned about her through phone records and the questioning of government officials.

Mr. Keller, The Times's executive editor, acknowledged that the case did not involve classic whistle-blowing.

"To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld," he said, referring to the secretary of defense, "you go to court with the case you've got. It would be nice if there was absolute clarity about the nature of this case. On the contrary, there's immense mystery about this case."

Mr. Fitzgerald, who has relied on secret evidence in persuading courts to order Ms. Miller jailed, said that the law now requires her to testify.

"The law says the grand jury is entitled to every man's evidence," he said. "We're doing our honest best to get to the bottom of whether a crime has been committed."

Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation is based on a 1982 law that made it a crime to disclose the identity of covert agents in some circumstances.

Robert S. Bennett, a lawyer for Ms. Miller, urged Judge Hogan to conclude that Ms. Miller would never talk, making confinement pointless.

Mr. Fitzgerald said no one could be sure that Ms. Miller would not talk until she was actually jailed.

"People change their minds," he said. "We saw here today that a source reached out to Mr. Cooper and caused him to testify. How do we know the same would not happen with Ms. Miller?"

In a statement, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times, said Ms. Miller had followed her conscience, with the paper's support. "There are times when the greater good of our democracy demands an act of conscience," Mr. Sulzberger said. "I sincerely hope that now Congress will move forward on federal shield legislation so that other journalists will not have to face imprisonment for doing their jobs."

Ms. Miller, speaking from the Virginia jail, said that her first hours in confinement had struck her as surreal but that the jail's staff had been professional and courteous. Her trip from the courthouse to the jail, she said, had brought home the gravity of her situation.

"They put shackles on my hands and my feet," she said. "They put you in the back of this car. I passed the Capitol and all the office buildings I used to cover. And I thought, 'My God, how did it come to this?' "

David Johnston contributed reporting for this article.

That tradition, according to Judge Hogan, does not deserve respect.

"That's the child saying: 'I'm still going to take that chocolate chip cookie and eat it. I don't care,' " the judge said.

This makes me so angry. I respect Judith Miller so much more than I respect the judge or our judicial system. This is a judge who is more interested in jailing the democratic witness who saw the thief than doing anything to the thief who may be a republican!

In a statement, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times, said Ms. Miller had followed her conscience, with the paper's support. "There are times when the greater good of our democracy demands an act of conscience," Mr. Sulzberger said. "I sincerely hope that now Congress will move forward on federal shield legislation so that other journalists will not have to face imprisonment for doing their jobs."


Amen!

New York Times journalist jailed for refusing to reveal source
Gary Younge in New York
Thursday July 7, 2005
Guardian

The New York Times reporter Judith Miller was last night sent to jail for refusing to reveal her source in an investigation into the leak of an undercover CIA agent's name. But in a dramatic conclusion to a two-year saga, her fellow defendant, the Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, avoided the same fate when he agreed to testify in an 11th-hour volte-face.

Cooper told a federal judge that the source had released him from his commitment to keep his identity secret.

"Last night I hugged my son goodbye and told him it might be a long time before I see him again," Cooper told the district court judge, Thomas Hogan. "I went to bed ready to accept the sanctions."

But since then, the source had told him "in somewhat dramatic fashion" that he could divulge his identity. "I am prepared to testify. I will comply," Cooper said. Miller refused to yield, and was jailed. "There is still a realistic possibility that confinement might cause her to testify," said Mr Hogan.

The case, with serious implications for US press freedom and heavy undertones of political skulduggery, has embroiled some of the most senior members of the Bush administration and some of the most prominent news organisations in the country.

The pair had applied for house arrest rather than a term in jail, but the appeal was thrown out.

"Forced vacation at a comfortable home is not a compelling form of coercion," said Patrick Fitzgerald, a special counsel. Referring to Miller's experience as a war correspondent in Iraq, Mr Fitzgerald added: "Certainly one who can handle the desert in wartime is far better equipped than the average person jailed in a federal facility."

He added: "Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality. No one in America is."

The controversy stems from the leaking of the identity of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, in July 2003. Ms Plame's husband, the former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had gone on a CIA-sponsored trip to investigate whether Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Niger.

Some time after his return, Mr Wilson publicly accused the Bush administration of exaggerating the case for going to war, in a comment article in the New York Times.

Angered by his comments, two unnamed officials reportedly told the columnist Robert Novak that Ms Plame was a CIA operative and had helped arrange her husband's trip to Niger.

It is a crime to knowingly divulge the identity of an undercover CIA operative, so when Novak published the claims he sparked a furore over whether an agent and her contacts had been compromised for partisan political purposes. It is believed that Novak has reached a deal with the special prosecutor, which is why he is not being pursued.

Along with Miller and Cooper, Time Inc was also charged with contempt and threatened with huge fines because it was in possession of Cooper's notes that could be relevant to the case.

Last week the magazine buckled under judicial pressure, against Cooper's wishes, and submitted the relevant documents to the judge. Some emails have shown that one of the people Cooper spoke to was George Bush's right-hand man Karl Rove - although Mr Rove insists he did not "knowingly" reveal Ms Plame's identity.

Cooper had argued that Time's handover rendered his testifying unnecessary. Mr Fitzgerald disagreed, but has reserved most of his ire for Miller and the New York Times. He made it clear that Miller was liable for criminal prosecution, as well as civil contempt.

"The court should advise Miller that if she persists in defying the court's order, that she will be committing a crime. Miller and the New York Times appear to have confused Miller's ability to commit contempt with her legal right to do so," wrote Mr Fitzgerald.

"Much of what appears to motivate Miller to commit contempt is the misguided reinforcement from others (specifically including her publisher) that placing herself above the law can be condoned."

Thanks for posting these articles. I've followed this with interest and I soooo admire this reporter for keeping faith with her informant.

Rose

July 7, 2005
Judith Miller Goes to Jail

This is a proud but awful moment for The New York Times and its employees. One of our reporters, Judith Miller, has decided to accept a jail sentence rather than testify before a grand jury about one of her confidential sources. Ms. Miller has taken a path that will be lonely and painful for her and her family and friends. We wish she did not have to choose it, but we are certain she did the right thing.

She is surrendering her liberty in defense of a greater liberty, granted to a free press by the founding fathers so journalists can work on behalf of the public without fear of regulation or retaliation from any branch of government.

The Press and the Law

Some people - including, sadly, some of our colleagues in the news media - have mistakenly assumed that a reporter and a news organization place themselves above the law by rejecting a court order to testify. Nothing could be further from the truth. When another Times reporter, M. A. Farber, went to jail in 1978 rather than release his confidential notes, he declared, "I have no such right and I seek none."

By accepting her sentence, Ms. Miller bowed to the authority of the court. But she acted in the great tradition of civil disobedience that began with this nation's founding, which holds that the common good is best served in some instances by private citizens who are willing to defy a legal, but unjust or unwise, order.

This tradition stretches from the Boston Tea Party to the Underground Railroad, to the Americans who defied the McCarthy inquisitions and to the civil rights movement. It has called forth ordinary citizens, like Rosa Parks; government officials, like Daniel Ellsberg and Mark Felt; and statesmen, like Martin Luther King. Frequently, it falls to news organizations to uphold this tradition. As Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1972, "The press has a preferred position in our constitutional scheme, not to enable it to make money, not to set newsmen apart as a favored class, but to bring to fulfillment the public's right to know."

Critics point out that even presidents must bow to the Supreme Court. But presidents are agents of the government, sworn to enforce the law. Journalists are private citizens, and Ms. Miller's actions are faithful to the Constitution. She is defending the right of Americans to get vital information from news organizations that need not fear government retaliation - an imperative defended by the 49 states that recognize a reporter's right to protect sources.

A second reporter facing a possible jail term, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, agreed yesterday to testify before the grand jury. Last week, Time decided, over Mr. Cooper's protests, to release documents demanded by the judge that revealed his confidential sources. We were deeply disappointed by that decision.

We do not see how a newspaper, magazine or television station can support a reporter's decision to protect confidential sources even if the potential price is lost liberty, and then hand over the notes or documents that make the reporter's sacrifice meaningless. The point of this struggle is to make sure that people with critical information can feel confident that if they speak to a reporter on the condition of anonymity, their identities will be protected. No journalist's promise will be worth much if the employer that stands behind him or her is prepared to undercut such a vow of secrecy.

Protecting a Reporter's Sources

Most readers understand a reporter's need to guarantee confidentiality to a source. Before he went to jail, Mr. Farber told the court that if he gave up documents that revealed the names of the people he had promised anonymity, "I will have given notice that the nation's premier newspaper is no longer available to those men and women who would seek it out - or who would respond to it - to talk freely and without fear."

While The Times has gone to great lengths lately to make sure that the use of anonymous sources is limited, there is no way to eliminate them. The most important articles tend to be the ones that upset people in high places, and many could not be reported if those who risked their jobs or even their liberty to talk to reporters knew that they might be identified the next day. In the larger sense, revealing government wrongdoing advances the rule of law, especially at a time of increased government secrecy.

It is for these reasons that most states have shield laws that protect reporters' rights to conceal their sources. Those laws need to be reviewed and strengthened, even as members of Congress continue to work to pass a federal shield law. But at this moment, there is no statute that protects Judith Miller when she defies a federal trial judge's order to reveal who told her what about Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as an undercover C.I.A. operative.

Ms. Miller understands this perfectly, and she accepts the consequences with full respect for the court. We hope that her sacrifice will alert the nation to the need to protect the basic tools reporters use in doing their most critical work.

To be frank, this is far from an ideal case. We would not have wanted our reporter to give up her liberty over a situation whose details are so complicated and muddy. But history is very seldom kind enough to provide the ideal venue for a principled stand. Ms. Miller is going to jail over an article that she never wrote, yet she has been unwavering in her determination to protect the people with whom she had spoken on the promise of confidentiality.

The Plame Story

The case involves an article by the syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who revealed that Joseph Wilson, a retired career diplomat, was married to an undercover C.I.A. officer Mr. Novak identified by using her maiden name, Valerie Plame. Mr. Wilson had been asked by the C.I.A. to investigate whether Saddam Hussein in Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger that could be used for making nuclear weapons. Mr. Wilson found no evidence of that, and he later wrote an Op-Ed article for The Times saying he believed that the Bush administration had misrepresented the facts.

It seemed very possible that someone at the White House had told Mr. Novak about Ms. Plame to undermine Mr. Wilson's credibility and send a chilling signal to other officials who might be inclined to speak out against the administration's Iraq policy. At the time, this page said that if those were indeed the circumstances, the leak had been "an egregious abuse of power." We urged the Justice Department to investigate. But we warned then that the inquiry should not degenerate into an attempt to compel journalists to reveal their sources.

We mainly had Mr. Novak in mind then, but Mr. Novak remains both free and mum about what he has or has not told the grand jury looking into the leak. Like almost everyone, we are baffled by his public posture. All we know now is that Mr. Novak - who early on expressed the opinion that no journalists who bowed to court pressure to betray sources could hold up their heads in Washington - has offered no public support to the colleague who is going to jail while he remains at liberty.

Ms. Miller did not write an article about Ms. Plame, but the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, wants to know whether anyone in government told her about Mr. Wilson's wife and her secret job. The inquiry has been conducted with such secrecy that it is hard to know exactly what Mr. Fitzgerald thinks Ms. Miller can tell him, or what argument he offered to convince the court that his need to hear her testimony outweighs the First Amendment.

What we do know is that if Ms. Miller testifies, it may be immeasurably harder in the future to persuade a frightened government employee to talk about malfeasance in high places, or a worried worker to reveal corporate crimes. The shroud of secrecy thrown over this case by the prosecutor and the judge, an egregious denial of due process, only makes it more urgent to take a stand.

Mr. Fitzgerald drove that point home chillingly when he said the authorities "can't have 50,000 journalists" making decisions about whether to reveal sources' names and that the government had a right to impose its judgment. But that's not what the founders had in mind in writing the First Amendment. In 1971, our colleague James Reston cited James Madison's admonition about a free press in explaining why The Times had first defied the Nixon administration's demand to stop publishing the Pentagon Papers and then fought a court's order to cease publication. "Among those principles deemed sacred in America," Madison wrote, "among those sacred rights considered as forming the bulwark of their liberty, which the government contemplates with awful reverence and would approach only with the most cautious circumspection, there is no one of which the importance is more deeply impressed on the public mind than the liberty of the press."

Mr. Fitzgerald's attempts to interfere with the rights of a free press while refusing to disclose his reasons for doing so, when he can't even say whether a crime has been committed, have exhibited neither reverence nor cautious circumspection. It would compound the tragedy if his actions emboldened more prosecutors to trample on a free press.

Our Bottom Line

Responsible journalists recognize that press freedoms are not absolute and must be exercised responsibly. This newspaper will not, for example, print the details of American troop movements in advance of a battle, because publication would endanger lives and national security. But these limits cannot be dictated by the whim of a branch of government, especially behind a screen of secrecy.

Indeed, the founders warned against any attempt to have the government set limits on a free press, under any conditions. "However desirable those measures might be which might correct without enslaving the press, they have never yet been devised in America," Madison wrote.

Journalists talk about these issues a great deal, and they can seem abstract. The test comes when a colleague is being marched off to jail for doing nothing more than the job our readers expected of her, and of the rest of us. The Times has been in these fights before, beginning in 1857, when a journalist named J. W. Simonton wrote an editorial about bribery in Congress and was held in contempt by the House of Representatives for 19 days when he refused to reveal his sources. In the end, Mr. Simonton kept faith, and the corrupt congressmen resigned. All of our battles have not had equally happy endings. But each time, whether we win or we lose, we remain convinced that the public wins in the long run and that what is at stake is nothing less than our society's perpetual bottom line: the citizens control the government in a democracy.

We stand with Ms. Miller and thank her for taking on that fight for the rest of us.

Miller's tale
Leader
Friday July 8, 2005
Guardian

The American constitution no longer protects the unfettered freedom of the press. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the remarkable case of the New York Times journalist Judith Miller, who has just begun what is likely to be a four-month prison term for refusing to reveal her sources for a story that was never published. Protecting the confidentiality of a source, the US courts have ruled, does not outweigh all other considerations. Rarely has the term Kafka-esque been used with greater justification than to describe the events leading to Ms Miller's imprisonment on Wednesday. Ms Miller had investigated - but not reported on - the naming of an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame, whose husband, a former diplomat, had written a New York Times article questioning the validity of key intelligence on the eve of the Iraq war. Mrs Plame was identified soon afterwards, in a column written by the rightwing polemicist Robert Novak. That naming was a criminal offence and an inquiry was launched into who had provided the information. Strangely, nothing is known of Mr Novak's contribution to the investigation, but Ms Miller was subpoenaed. In a further twist, Ms Miller has been highlighted as one of the New York Times reporters who had relied too heavily on Iraqi exiles for overstated reports of Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Uncharitable commentators claim she is now trying to redeem herself by her uncompromising stand in the current case.

Throughout, the US courts have accepted that precedence must be given to the task of bringing to justice the person who committed the crime of naming a CIA agent rather than the principle of protecting the confidentiality of a journalist's source. The British courts would, under the Human Rights Act, also have to balance the right to privacy with the right to freedom of expression.

Confidentiality of sources is an indispensible, if not an entirely untrammelled, weapon in the pursuit of truth, on which the Guardian writes with the humility of past experience. To reiterate one of those principles that Tony Blair promised to uphold after yesterday's London bombings: the more accessible truth is, the better informed the electorate, and the better protected democracy. It is not clear who Ms Miller spoke to or what she was told. But she should not be in prison and if the constitution does not protect her, then surely it is time for a federal law that will. And we should guard against this change in the legal climate crossing the Atlantic.

July 11, 2005
For Time Reporter, Decision to Testify Came After Frenzied Last-Minute Calls

By ADAM LIPTAK
This article was reported by David Johnston, Jacques Steinberg and Adam Liptak and was written by Mr. Liptak.

WASHINGTON, July 10 - Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine, stood before a federal judge on Wednesday, facing up to four months in jail for refusing to testify about a confidential source. But he told the judge that he had just received a surprising communication from his source that would allow him to testify before a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. operative.

"A short time ago," Mr. Cooper said, "in somewhat dramatic fashion, I received an express personal release from my source."

But the facts appear more complicated than they seemed in court. Mr. Cooper, it turns out, never spoke to his confidential source that day, said Robert D. Luskin, a lawyer for the source, who is now known to be Karl Rove, the senior White House political adviser.

The development was actually the product of a frenzied series of phone calls initiated that morning by a lawyer for Mr. Cooper and involving Mr. Luskin and the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald. And the calls were the culmination of days of anxiety and introspection by a reporter who by all accounts wanted to live up to his pledge to protect his confidential source yet find a way to avoid going to jail as another reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, was about to do.

Mr. Cooper and his personal lawyer, Richard A. Sauber, declined to comment on the negotiations, but Mr. Sauber said that Mr. Cooper had used the word "personal" to mean specific. Representatives of Mr. Fitzgerald did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In the days before, Mr. Cooper viewed his situation as in many ways different from Ms. Miller's.

While Ms. Miller had consistently refused to testify, Mr. Cooper had already given testimony once in the investigation, in August 2004, describing conversations he had had with I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

And while Ms. Miller had the support of her employer, Time had handed over documents that identified Mr. Rove as one of Mr. Cooper's sources, after the United States Supreme Court refused to hear appeals from the reporters and the magazine last month. "The question that was on his mind," said Steven Waldman, a college classmate and former national editor at U.S. News and World Report, "and this is my words, is: do you go to jail to protect the confidentiality of a source whose name has been revealed, and not by you but by someone else?"

Mr. Waldman, editor in chief of Beliefnet, a religion and spirituality Web site, exchanged several e-mail messages with his friend in the days leading to Mr. Cooper's decision to end his resistance.

"I remember saying to him," Mr. Waldman continued, " 'Look, there are two principles you're trying to balance. One is the confidentiality of sources. The other is an obligation to your family. They're both moral principles. It's totally appropriate to view that as a balance.' "

Mr. Cooper was resistant to that notion, Mr. Waldman said.

Later, Mr. Waldman asked whether Time's disclosures and a blanket waiver form his source had signed were enough to allow him to testify. In an e-mail message on Tuesday night, Mr. Cooper said he believed the forms could have been coerced and thus worthless.

The only thing that would do, Mr. Cooper wrote, was a "certain, unambiguous waiver" from his source.

Around 7:30 on Wednesday morning, Mr. Cooper had said goodbye to his son, resigned to his fate. His lawyer, Mr. Sauber, called to alert him to a statement from Mr. Luskin in The Wall Street Journal.

"If Matt Cooper is going to jail to protect a source," Mr. Luskin told The Journal, "it's not Karl he's protecting."

That provided an opening, Mr. Cooper said. "I was not looking for a waiver," he said, "but on Wednesday morning my lawyer called and said, 'Look at The Wall Street Journal. I think we should take a shot.' And I said, 'Yes, it's an invitation.' "

In court shortly after 2, he told Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the Federal District Court in Washington that he had received "an express personal release from my source."

That statement surprised Mr. Luskin, Mr. Rove's lawyer. Mr. Luskin said he had only reaffirmed the blanket waiver, in response to a request from Mr. Fitzgerald.

"Karl was not afraid of what Cooper is going to say and is clearly trying to be fully candid with the prosecutor," Mr. Luskin said.

A report on Newsweek's Web site on Sunday, that the magazine said was based on a document Time produced to the special prosecutor, added other elements to the puzzle. While Mr. Rove did identify the operative in a conversation with Mr. Cooper, Mr. Rove did not use her name - Valerie Plame, as she has been called in news accounts, or Valerie Wilson, as she prefers - or refer to her covert status, Newsweek said. Lawyers involved in the negotiations did not dispute the accuracy of the document Newsweek cited.

The information may bear on whether Mr. Rove violated the 1982 law forbidding the knowing identification of covert agents, the basis of Mr. Fitzgerald's grand jury investigation.

"A fair reading of the e-mail as well as the context in which the conversation took place makes it clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity," Mr. Luskin said.

Mr. Cooper was never shy about telling friends that he desperately wanted to avoid jail, for his own sake and because his absence would be so confusing to his son. But they say he was resolute in the last days and hours, though hoping for a satisfactory waiver from his source.

A look at the last time Mr. Cooper testified in the investigation suggests that how to determine whether a source's waiver is authentic can be a judgment call.

Mr. Cooper's statements on Wednesday echoed his rationale for testifying last summer. "Mr. Libby," a statement issued by the magazine at the time said, "gave a personal waiver of confidentiality for Mr. Cooper to testify."

In an interview Friday, Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph A. Tate, disputed that.

"Mr. Libby signed a form," Mr. Tate said. "He gave it back to the F.B.I. End of story. There was no other assurance."

At most, Mr. Tate said in a separate interview last year, he had answered entreaties by lawyers for Mr. Cooper and other reporters by repeating what was in the waivers.

"I told them they had nothing to hide and could rely upon the waiver," Mr. Tate said last year.

Mr. Cooper was one of four reporters who testified in the investigation last summer. All of them said they were satisfied that Mr. Libby had given them earnest and uncoerced permission to talk.

"I personally called Libby about a waiver," Mr. Cooper said, "and he said that if it was O.K. with his lawyer it was O.K. with him."

But the other three reporters - Glenn Kessler and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post and Tim Russert of NBC - all said afterward that they had not discussed Ms. Wilson with Mr. Libby. Mr. Cooper was more cryptic. According to a statement from Time, the earlier testimony focused "entirely on conversations Mr. Cooper had with Mr. Libby."

Ms. Miller has been jailed for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury subpoena directing her to testify about "a specified executive branch official" whose identity is known to the special prosecutor in the case, according to court papers. But Ms. Miller refuses to rely on the waiver the source signed or the sort of assurances that have satisfied other reporters.

After testifying about Mr. Libby, Mr. Cooper was surprised to receive a second subpoena, in September of last year. That subpoena was focused, it now appears, on a single conversation with Mr. Rove on July 11, 2003.

Mr. Cooper was not an obvious vehicle for a sensitive leak. He had become one of the magazine's White House correspondents only the month before the conversation and is married to a prominent Democratic strategist, Mandy Grunwald.

The conversation took place a few days before Ms. Wilson's identity became public in the form of her maiden name, Valerie Plame. Robert Novak first disclosed it in a syndicated column published on July 14, 2003, attributing the information to "two senior administration officials." Mr. Novak has refused to say whether he cooperated with Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation.

Three days later, Mr. Cooper and two other reporters wrote that "some administration officials have noted to Time in interviews" that "Valerie Plame is a C.I.A. official."

Ms. Wilson's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat, had written an opinion article for The New York Times critical of the Bush administration based on a trip he had taken for the Central Intelligence Agency to Africa. The disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity was, the Time article said, either retaliation for the article or an effort to undermine its conclusions, by suggesting that his trip was his wife's idea.

The widely divergent outcomes of Mr. Cooper's case and Ms. Miller's case reflected an evolving split in their legal strategies. At first the two reporters shared a legal team, led by Floyd Abrams, a noted First Amendment lawyer.

But after a federal appeals court refused to block Mr. Fitzgerald's subpoenas, Time and Mr. Cooper replaced Mr. Abrams with a team led by Theodore B. Olson, a former United States solicitor general in the Bush administration who is now with Gibson Dunn & Crutcher.

In an interview on Friday, Norman Pearlstine, the editor in chief of Time Inc., which is owned by Time Warner, said he hired new lawyers to bring a fresh perspective and complementary talents, not to seek a deal.

George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company, said the organizations' lawyers worked well together in the months before the Supreme Court's refusal of their appeals.

Unlike Time, however, The New York Times was not held in contempt.

When Mr. Pearlstine told Mr. Cooper that Time was turning over his documents, Mr. Cooper did not make a scene or threaten to quit.

"I don't think Matt's a screamer," Mr. Pearlstine said. "He was pretty resolute. He thought we should resist this."

Even in the final hours, Mr. Pearlstine said: "I did not know whether Matt was going to testify or not. No matter what he did our comment was going to be that we respect him as a journalist and we respect his decision."

David Johnston and Adam Liptak reported from Washington for this article, and Jacques Steinberg from New York.

July 10, 2005
We're Not in Watergate Anymore

By FRANK RICH
WHEN John Dean published his book "Worse Than Watergate (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B02E1DB153AF931A35756C0A9629C8B 63&n=Top%2fFeatures%2fBooks%2fBook%20Reviews)" in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse "gates" thereafter. But it's hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote. No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate.

To start to see why, forget all the legalistic chatter about shield laws and turn instead to "The Secret Man (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/06/books/06kaku.html?n=Top%2fFeatures%2fBooks%2fBook%20Revi ews)," Bob Woodward's new memoir about life with Deep Throat. The book arrived in stores just as Judy Miller was jailed, as if by divine intervention to help illuminate her case.

Should a journalist protect a sleazy, possibly even criminal, source? Yes, sometimes, if the public is to get news of wrongdoing. Mark Felt was a turncoat with alternately impenetrable and self-interested motives who betrayed the F.B.I. and, in Mr. Woodward's words, "lied to his colleagues, friends and even his family." (Mr. Felt even lied in his own 1979 memoir.) Should a journalist break a promise of confidentiality after, let alone before, the story is over? "It is critical that confidential sources feel they would be protected for life," Mr. Woodward writes. "There needed to be a model out there where people could come forward or speak when contacted, knowing they would be protected. It was a matter of my work, a matter of honor."

That honorable model, which has now been demolished at Time, was a given in what seems like the halcyon Watergate era of "The Secret Man." Mr. Woodward and Carl Bernstein had confidence that The Washington Post's publisher, Katharine Graham, and editor, Ben Bradlee, would back them to the hilt, even though the Nixon White House demonized their reporting as inaccurate (as did some journalistic competitors) and threatened the licenses of television stations owned by the Post Company.

At Time, Norman Pearlstine - a member of the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists, no less - described his decision to turn over Matt Cooper's files to the feds as his own, made on the merits and without consulting any higher-ups at Time Warner. That's no doubt the truth, but a corporate mentality needn't be imposed by direct fiat; it's a virus that metastasizes in the bureaucratic bloodstream. I doubt anyone at Time Warner ever orders an editor to promote a schlocky Warner Brothers movie either. (Entertainment Weekly did two covers in one month on "The Matrix Reloaded.")

Time Warner seems to have far too much money on the table in Washington to exercise absolute editorial freedom when covering the government; at this moment it's awaiting an F.C.C. review of its joint acquisition (with Comcast) of the bankrupt cable company Adelphia. "Is this a journalistic company or an entertainment company?" (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/politics/01comply.html) David Halberstam asked after the Pearlstine decision. We have the answer now. What high-level source would risk talking to Time about governmental corruption after this cave-in? What top investigative reporter would choose to work there?

But the most important difference between the Bush and Nixon eras has less to do with the press than with the grave origins of the particular case that has sent Judy Miller to jail. This scandal didn't begin, as Watergate did, simply with dirty tricks and spying on the political opposition. It began with the sending of American men and women to war in Iraq.

Specifically, it began with the former ambassador Joseph Wilson's July 6, 2003, account on the Times Op-Ed page (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/opinion/06WILS.html) (and in concurrent broadcast appearances) of his 2002 C.I.A. mission to Africa to determine whether Saddam Hussein had struck a deal in Niger for uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons. Mr. Wilson concluded that there was no such deal, as my colleague Nicholas Kristof reported, without divulging Mr. Wilson's name, that spring. But the envoy's dramatic Op-Ed piece got everyone's attention: a government insider with firsthand knowledge had stepped out of the shadows of anonymity to expose the administration's game authoritatively on the record. He had made palpable what Bush critics increasingly suspected, writing that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Up until that point, the White House had consistently stuck by the 16 incendiary words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The administration had ignored all reports, not just Mr. Wilson's, that this information might well be bogus. But it still didn't retract Mr. Bush's fiction some five weeks after the State of the Union, when Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, announced that the uranium claim was based on fake documents. Instead, we marched on to war in Iraq days later. It was not until Mr. Wilson's public recounting of his African mission more than five months after the State of the Union that George Tenet at long last released a hasty statement (on a Friday evening, just after the Wilson Op-Ed piece) conceding that "these 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president."

The Niger uranium was hardly the only dubious evidence testifying to Saddam's supposed nuclear threat in the run-up to war. Judy Miller herself was one of two reporters responsible for a notoriously credulous front-page Times story about aluminum tubes (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/international/middleeast/08IRAQ.html) that enabled the administration's propaganda campaign to trump up Saddam's W.M.D. arsenal. But red-hot uranium was sexy, and it was Mr. Wilson's flat refutation of it that drove administration officials to seek their revenge: they told the columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson had secured his (nonpaying) African mission through the nepotistic intervention of his wife, a covert C.I.A. officer whom they outed by name. The pettiness of this retribution shows just how successfully Mr. Wilson hit the administration's jugular: his revelation threatened the legitimacy of the war on which both the president's reputation and re-election campaign had been staked.

This was another variation on a Watergate theme. Charles Colson's hit men broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, seeking information to smear Mr. Ellsberg after he leaked the Pentagon Papers, the classified history of the Vietnam War, to The Times. But there was even greater incentive to smear Mr. Wilson than Mr. Ellsberg. Nixon compounded the Vietnam War but didn't start it. The war in Iraq, by contrast, is Mr. Bush's invention.

Again following the Watergate template, the Bush administration at first tried to bury the whole Wilson affair by investigating itself. Even when The Washington Post reported two months after Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed that "two top White House officials" had called at least six reporters, not just Mr. Novak, to destroy Mr. Wilson and his wife, the inquiry was kept safely within the John Ashcroft Justice Department, with the attorney general, according to a Times report (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/politics/22LEAK.html), being briefed regularly on details of the investigation. If that rings a Watergate bell now, that's because on Thursday you may have read the obituary of L. Patrick Gray, Mark Felt's F.B.I. boss, who, in a similarly cozy conflict of interest, kept the Nixon White House abreast of the supposedly independent Watergate inquiry in its early going.

Political pressure didn't force Mr. Ashcroft to relinquish control of the Wilson investigation to a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, until Dec. 30, 2003, more than five months after Mr. Novak's column ran. Now 18 more months have passed, and no one knows what crime Mr. Fitzgerald is investigating. Is it the tricky-to-prosecute outing of Mr. Wilson's wife, the story Judy Miller never even wrote about? Or has Mr. Fitzgerald moved on to perjury and obstruction of justice possibly committed by those who tried to hide their roles in that outing? If so, it would mean the Bush administration was too arrogant to heed the most basic lesson of Watergate: the cover-up is worse than the crime.

"Mr. Fitzgerald made his bones prosecuting the mob," intoned the pro-Bush editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, "and doesn't seem to realize that this case isn't about organized crime." But that may be exactly what it is about to an ambitious prosecutor with his own career on the line. That the Bush administration would risk breaking the law with an act as self-destructive to American interests as revealing a C.I.A. officer's identity smacks of desperation. It makes you wonder just what else might have been done to suppress embarrassing election-season questions about the war that has mired us in Iraq even as the true perpetrators of 9/11 resurface in Madrid, London and who knows where else.

IN his original Op-Ed piece in The Times, published two years to the day before Judy Miller went to jail, Mr. Wilson noted that "more than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already," before concluding that "we have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons." As that death toll surges past 1,700, that sacred duty cannot be abandoned by a free press now.

July 12, 2005
At White House, a Day of Silence on Rove's Role in C.I.A. Leak

By RICHARD W. STEVENSON (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=RICHARD%20W.%20STEVENSON&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=RICHARD%20W.%20STEVENSON&inline=nyt-per)
WASHINGTON, July 11 - Nearly two years after stating that any administration official found to have been involved in leaking the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer would be fired, and assuring that Karl Rove and other senior aides to President Bush had nothing to do with the disclosure, the White House refused on Monday to answer any questions about new evidence of Mr. Rove's role in the matter.

With the White House silent, Democrats rushed in, demanding that the administration provide a full account of any involvement by Mr. Rove, one of the president's closest advisers, turning up the political heat in the case and leaving some Republicans worried about the possible effects on Mr. Bush's second-term agenda.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, cited Mr. Bush's statements about firing anyone involved in the leak and said, "I trust they will follow through on this pledge."

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Mr. Rove, given his stature and the principles involved in the case, could not hide behind legal advice not to comment.

"The lesson of history for George Bush and Karl Rove is that the best way to help themselves is to bring out all the facts, on their own, quickly," Mr. Schumer said, citing the second-term scandals that have beset previous administrations.

In two contentious news briefings, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, would not directly address any of a barrage of questions about Mr. Rove's involvement, a day after new evidence suggested that Mr. Rove had discussed the C.I.A. officer with a Time magazine reporter in July 2003 without identifying her by name.

Under often hostile questioning, Mr. McClellan repeatedly declined to say whether he stood behind his previous statements that Mr. Rove had played no role in the matter, saying he could not comment while a criminal investigation was under way. He brushed aside questions about whether the president would follow through on his pledge, repeated just over a year ago, to fire anyone in his administration found to have played a role in disclosing the officer's identity. And he declined to say when Mr. Bush learned that Mr. Rove had mentioned the C.I.A. officer in his conversation with the Time reporter.

When one reporter, David Gregory of NBC News, said that it was "ridiculous" for the White House to dodge all questions about the issue and pointed out that Mr. McClellan had addressed the same issues in detail in the past, Mr. McClellan replied, "I'm well aware, like you, of what was previously said, and I will be glad to talk about it at the appropriate time."

A moment later, Terry Moran of ABC News prefaced his question by saying Mr. McClellan was "in a bad spot here" because he had spoken from the same podium on Oct. 10, 2003, after the Justice Department began its formal investigation into the leak, and specifically said that neither Mr. Rove nor two other officials - Elliot Abrams, a national security aide, and I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff - were involved.

Mr. McClellan disputed the characterization of the question but did not directly address why the White House had appeared now to have adopted a new policy of not commenting on the matter.

Mr. Rove made no public comment. A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House now says its official position is not to comment on the case while it is under investigation by a federal special prosecutor, said Mr. Rove had gone about his business as usual on Monday. The official said Mr. Rove had held his regular meetings with Mr. Bush and other top White House aides, and was deeply involved in preparations for the Supreme Court nomination and efforts to push several major pieces of legislation through Congress this month.

The officer was first publicly identified under her maiden name as Valerie Plame, "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction," on July 14, 2003, by the syndicated columnist Robert Novak. He wrote that Ms. Plame was the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had recently written an Op-Ed article for The New York Times disputing an administration claim about Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. Mr. Novak cited "two senior administration officials" as the source of his information.

The criminal investigation into how the C.I.A. officer's name came to appear in a syndicated newspaper column two years ago continued largely out of public view. But the recent disclosure of evidence that Mr. Rove had, without naming Ms. Plame, told a Time reporter about the same time that Mr. Wilson's wife "works at the agency," thrust the case squarely back into the political arena. That reflected Mr. Rove's standing as among the most powerful men in Washington and his place in the innermost councils of the White House.

Because of the powerful role Mr. Rove plays in shaping policy and deploying Mr. Bush's political support and machinery throughout the party, few Republicans were willing to discuss his situation on the record. Asked for comment, several Republican senators said on Monday that they did not know enough or did not want to venture an opinion.

But in private, several prominent Republicans said they were concerned about the possible effects on Mr. Bush and his agenda, in part because Mr. Rove's stature makes him such a tempting target for Democrats.

"Knowing Rove, he's still having eight different policy meetings and sticking to his game plan," said one veteran Republican strategist in Washington who often works with the White House. "But this issue now is looming, and as they peel away another layer of the onion, there's a lot of consternation. Rove needs to be on his A game now, not huddled with lawyers and press people."

A senior Congressional Republican aide said most members of Congress were still waiting to learn more about Mr. Rove's involvement and to assess whether more disclosures about his role were likely.

"The only fear here is where does this go," the aide said. "We can't know."

Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush's senior adviser, deputy chief of staff and political strategist, was plunged back into the center of the matter on Sunday, when Newsweek reported that an e-mail message written by a Time reporter had recounted a conversation with Mr. Rove in July 2003 in which Mr. Rove discussed the C.I.A. operative at the heart of the case without naming her.

Mr. Rove's lawyer, Robert D. Luskin, has said the e-mail message showed that Mr. Rove was not taking part in any organized effort to disclose Ms. Plame's identity. Mr. Wilson is a former diplomat who traveled to Africa on behalf of the C.I.A. before the Iraq war to investigate reports concerning Saddam Hussein's efforts to acquire nuclear material.

Mr. Wilson has suggested that the White House sought retribution by publicly identifying his wife, effectively ending her career as a covert operative.

Mr. Wilson has at times voiced suspicions that Mr. Rove played a role in identifying his wife to reporters, saying in August 2003 that he was interested in finding out "whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."

In September 2003, Mr. McClellan said flatly that Mr. Rove had not been involved in disclosing Ms. Plame's name. Asked about the issue on Sept. 29, 2003, Mr. McClellan said he had "spoken with Karl Rove," and that it was "simply not true" that Mr. Rove had a role in the disclosure of her identity. Two weeks earlier, he had called suggestions that Mr. Rove had been involved "totally ridiculous." On Oct. 10, 2003, after the Justice Department opened its investigation, Mr. McClellan told reporters that Mr. Rove, Mr. Abrams and Mr. Libby had nothing to do with the leak.

Mr. McClellan and Mr. Bush have both made clear that leaking Ms. Plame's identity would be considered a firing offense by the White House. Mr. Bush was asked about that position most recently a little over a year ago, when he was asked whether he stood by his pledge to fire anyone found to have leaked the officer's name. "Yes," he replied, on June 10, 2004.

Under some circumstances, it can be against the law to disclose the identity of a covert C.I.A. operative. Mr. Luskin has said he has been told by the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, that Mr. Rove is not a target of the investigation.

Democrats, as the minority party in both the House and the Senate, have no ability to push forward with a formal Congressional investigation. But Mr. Rove is such a high-profile political target that his role is sure to draw intense scrutiny from both Democrats in Congress and liberal interest groups.

Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Government Reform committee, called for hearings on what he termed "this disgraceful incident," saying that if it had happened in the Clinton administration the Republican-controlled House would certainly have summoned the deputy White House chief of staff to testify.

Mr. Rove has been caught up in the inquiry almost from the start. He was first interviewed by F.B.I. agents in 2003 during the preliminary investigation. Later, he was interviewed by prosecutors and testified three times to the grand jury.

The prosecutor is believed to have questioned Mr. Rove at the grand jury about his conversations with the Time reporter, Matthew Cooper, whose call to Mr. Rove on July 11, 2003, was noted in a White House log that was turned over to the prosecutor. Time turned Mr. Cooper's notes and e-mail over to the prosecutor last month under court order.

The 1982 law that makes it a crime to disclose the identities of covert operatives is not easy to break. It has apparently been the basis of a single prosecution, against Sharon M. Scranage, a C.I.A. clerk in Ghana who pleaded guilty in 1985 to identifying two C.I.A. agents to a boyfriend.

A prosecutor seeking to establish a violation of the law has to establish an intentional disclosure by someone with authorized access to classified information. That person must know that the disclosure identifies a covert agent "and that the United States was taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States." A covert agent is defined as someone whose identity is classified and who has served outside the United States within the last five years.

"We made it exceedingly difficult to violate," Victoria Toensing, who was chief counsel to the Senate intelligence committee when the law was enacted, said of the law.

The e-mail message from Mr. Cooper to his bureau chief describing a brief conversation with Mr. Rove, first reported in Newsweek, does not by itself establish that Mr. Rove knew Ms. Wilson's covert status or that the government was taking measures to protect her.

Based on the e-mail message, Mr. Rove's disclosures are not criminal, said Bruce S. Sanford, a Washington lawyer who helped write the law and submitted a brief on behalf of several news organizations concerning it to the appeals court hearing the case of Mr. Cooper and Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times. Ms. Miller has gone to jail rather than disclose her source.

"It is clear that Karl Rove's conversation with Matt Cooper does not fall into that category" of criminal conduct, Mr. Sanford said. "That's not 'knowing.' It doesn't even come close."

There has been some dispute, moreover, about just how secret a secret agent Ms. Wilson was.

"She had a desk job in Langley," said Ms. Toensing, who also signed the supporting brief in the appeals court, referring to the C.I.A.'s headquarters. "When you want someone in deep cover, they don't go back and forth to Langley."

Carl Hulse and David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Adam Liptak from New York.

August 15, 2005 41 Days in Jail and Counting

As of today, Judith Miller has spent more time behind bars to protect privileged information than any other New York Times journalist. Reporters from other news organizations have endured longer jail time in the same important cause over the years, but for us and we hope for others, it should be clear after 41 days in a Virginia jail that Ms. Miller is not going to change her mind. She appears unwavering in her mission to safeguard the freedom of the press to do its job effectively.
If she is not willing to testify after 41 days, then she is not willing to testify. It's time for the judge and the prosecutor to let Ms. Miller go.
An investigative reporter for The Times, Ms. Miller was ordered to testify as part of an investigation into the disclosure of the identity of a covert operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. It is not yet clear where the investigation is going, or why Ms. Miller's testimony was demanded by Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor. Intentionally revealing the identity of a covert operative by a government official is a crime, but at this point, the only one serving time in jail is a civilian, Ms Miller.
It is true that some journalists have abused and overused unnamed sources over the years. But in the main, the secret source is not a convenience for the news media or a shortcut for an easy story. He or she is the backbone of a free and independent press. Think about the civil servant who sees a superior lying and breaking the law. Think about the employee who sees a manager whitewashing a report on a hazardous product.
On July 6, as she was standing in a Washington courtroom preparing to go to jail, Ms Miller told the judge, "If journalists cannot be trusted to guarantee confidentiality, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press."
Ms. Miller has spent 41 days trying to preserve that guarantee. That is far too long, for her, for us and especially for a country that prides itself on exporting its belief in a free press to the rest of the world.

August 16, 2005
The Underprivileged Press

By BOB DOLE
Washington
LIKE many Americans, I am perplexed by the federal investigation into the alleged leak of classified information that exposed Valerie Plame Wilson, the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, as a Central Intelligence Agency officer. So far the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has achieved one notable result: putting a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, in jail for refusing to break her promise of confidentiality to her sources in response to a grand jury subpoena. The incarceration of Ms. Miller is all the more baffling because she has never written a word about the C.I.A. flap.
If state rather than federal authorities were conducting this investigation, Ms. Miller most likely would not be in jail. Today 49 states and the District of Columbia recognize a "reporter's privilege," either by statute or through state judicial decisions, which allows journalists to report information and protect confidential sources without fear of imprisonment.
Unfortunately, at the federal level the legal landscape is much less clear. In 1972, the Supreme Court held that reporters do not have an absolute privilege to protect their sources from prosecutors. And various federal appeals courts have developed inconsistent standards on how and when such a privilege may apply.
Congress can help rectify this situation by passing a bill introduced by Senator Richard G. Lugar and Representative Mike Pence, both Indiana Republicans, that sets clear standards the federal government must meet before it issues a subpoena to a reporter in a criminal or civil case. For example, in a criminal investigation, a reporter would be required to turn over confidential information only if a court determined that there are reasonable grounds to believe a crime has been committed, that the requested information is essential to the investigation and that it could not be obtained from nonmedia sources. This is hardly a free pass for journalists; importantly, the bill specifically authorizes the forced disclosure of a source's identity if doing so is necessary to prevent imminent and actual harm to national security.
As someone with a long record of government service, I must admit that I did not always appreciate the inquisitive nature of the press. But I do understand that the purpose of a reporter's privilege is not to somehow elevate journalists above other segments of society. Instead, it is designed to help guarantee that the public continues to be well informed.
Of course, some critics will contend that protecting the news media along the lines of the Lugar-Pence bill would make it harder to prosecute crimes because of the potential loss of relevant evidence. But this argument ignores the dozens of whistle-blowers who would not share information about government wrongdoing with the press unless they felt reporters could protect their identities. This is why the attorneys general of 34 states filed an amicus brief in May asking the Supreme Court to recognize a federal reporter's privilege.
I am also greatly concerned about Judith Miller's situation because she has been incarcerated as a result of an investigation into possible violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, of which I was a sponsor. The law was intended to protect covert intelligence operatives whose lives would be endangered if their identities were publicly disclosed. We were particularly concerned about people like the notorious Philip Agee, a former C.I.A. officer who systematically exposed the agency's covert operatives.
Thus the act was drafted in very narrow terms: our goal was to criminalize only those disclosures that clearly represented a conscious and pernicious effort to identify and expose agents with the intent to impair America's foreign intelligence activities. Not surprisingly, there has been only one prosecution under the act since it was passed.
With the facts known publicly today regarding the Plame case, it is difficult to see how a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act could have occurred. For example, one of the requirements is that the federal government must be taking "affirmative measures" to conceal the agent's intelligence relationship with the United States. Yet we now know that Ms. Wilson held a desk job at C.I.A. headquarters and could be seen traveling to and from work. The journalist Robert D. Novak, whose July 14, 2003, column mentioned Ms. Wilson, using her maiden name, and set off the investigation, has written that C.I.A. officials confirmed to him over the telephone that she was an employee before he wrote his column.
I, of course, do not know what evidence Mr. Fitzgerald has presented to the grand jury, nor will I hazard a guess as to the final outcome of his investigation. But the imprisonment of Judith Miller will be even more troubling if it turns out that no violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act has occurred. As she sits in jail, Congress can honor her commitment to principle and her courage, and that of all reporters who have helped expose wrongdoing by protecting their sources, by passing the Lugar-Pence bill and creating a federal privilege for reporters.
Bob Dole, the Republican candidate for president in 1996, was a senator from 1969 to 1996.

Locked in the Alexandria, Va., Detention Center for the past 11 weeks, New York Times reporter Judith Miller is cut off from the world. She has no Internet access and little opportunity to view CNN. Her phone calls are limited, friends say. Her daily newspaper arrives a day late.
But for 30 minutes nearly every day, the world comes to her: A parade of prominent government and media officials, 99 in all, visited Miller between early July, when she was jailed for refusing to be questioned by a federal prosecutor, and Labor Day, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post.


Full story in


http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002502806_millervisit18.html

"The prosecutor in open court talked about the possibility of convening a new grand jury," Abrams told E&P Monday, referring to the original sentencing hearing. When Miller was put behind bars on July 6, the sentence was for 18 months or until the grand jury ends its investigation.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001138944

"I know that you and our readers still have a lot of questions about how this drama unfolded," he told the staff members. He said the paper had been wary of revealing too much about the case for fear of compounding Ms. Miller's legal problems, but added, "Now that she's free, we intend to answer those questions to the best of our ability in a thoroughly reported piece in the pages of The New York Times, and soon. We owe it to our readers, and we owe it to you, our staff."


Full article at


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/national/04reporter.html?hp&ex=1128484800&en=44e8e4dedec6b126&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Well, I thought I respected every journalist who has chosen jail over outing a source.... until now.

I originally had no respect for Judy Miller because of her role in passing along the administration's "weapons of mass destruction" myth.... well... I changed my mind when she chose to pay the price for a noble principle.

Now, I know the whole story isn't in, but it sure looks like she got sick of jail and the "principle" went out the window.

And she was wrong when she said that "her cooperation with the investigation, including testifying and turning over her notes, had not compromised the future ability of reporters to protect the confidentiality of their sources.

"'Quite the contrary,' she said. 'I set up clear standards for when I would cooperate, and they were known to everyone.'"

Yeah...

Unfortunately, her example just tells judges that if they stick it to reporters, eventually they'll give in.

Not good for everyone else. A better example is Vanessa Liggett in Texas. She did the whole bid and never wavered.

Okay, I'm off my soapbox LOL...

As I told the grand jury, I recalled Mr. Libby's frustration and anger about what he called "selective leaking" by the C.I.A. and other agencies to distance themselves from what he recalled as their unequivocal prewar intelligence assessments. The selective leaks trying to shift blame to the White House, he told me, were part of a "perverted war" over the war in Iraq. I testified about these conversations after spending 85 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with the grand jury inquiry. Having been summoned to testify before the grand jury, I went to jail instead, to protect my source - Mr. Libby - because he had not communicated to me his personal and voluntary permission to speak.


Full article at


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/national/16miller.html

`Well, I thought I respected every journalist who has chosen jail over outing a source.... until now.

I originally had no respect for Judy Miller because of her role in passing along the administration's "weapons of mass destruction" myth.... well... I changed my mind when she chose to pay the price for a noble principle.

Now, I know the whole story isn't in, but it sure looks like she got sick of jail and the "principle" went out the window. '



qwerty

I have to admit for some sympathy for how you feel...except that I didn't think she should have been jailed and I feel for anyone in jail who is mistreated, has an inappropriate sentence or, of course, shouldn't be there at all.

Titantoo

October 17, 2005
Judith Miller and The Times: Pieces of a Puzzle (7 Letters)

To the Editor:
Re "The Miller Case: A Notebook, a Cause, a Jail Cell and a Deal" (front page, Oct. 16):
So a new day has dawned in the world of American journalism.
A free press used to mean that journalists were at least relatively autonomous from the government that they covered. When journalists sought to protect the identities of their sources, it used to imply that those sources, whether from government or private enterprises, were offering crucial information that would otherwise be kept from the public.
After reading The Times's coverage of Judith Miller's testimony and Ms. Miller's own account, I can only conclude that "freedom of the press" and "protecting sources" have entered into the lexicon of Orwellian Newspeak.
The press is apparently free to work in cahoots with government officials to take the country to war on false premises; and the sources a journalist is willing to go to jail to protect include government officials apparently engaged in disinformation campaigns.
If these are the principles that The Times stood behind, it is a sad day for the newspaper. But perhaps it is saddest of all for those of us who still think that the old ideas about the place of the press in an open society were pretty good ones.
Sara Murphy
New York, Oct. 16, 2005
• To the Editor:
As a former journalist and current college teacher, I think The Times did the right thing in defending Judith Miller and her decision to protect her sources. Clearly the publisher's support meant a lot to Ms. Miller.
I think that it's of little consequence that The Times was scooped on aspects of this story. That The Times does not follow the scoop mentality of many other national news media is among the reasons The Times remains The Times.
Those of us old enough to remember publication of the Pentagon Papers know that The Times is willing to take the lead when appropriate. The paper's handling of coverage of the Miller case illustrates that The Times is also willing be to patient when circumstances demand.
I am sure that all who value the principles that support a free press are relieved that Ms. Miller is out of jail, and grateful to Ms. Miller and The Times for having taken this courageous and patient stand.
David W. Johnson
Slippery Rock, Pa., Oct. 16, 2005
• To the Editor:
While I applaud your efforts in providing your readers a detailed account of Judith Miller's experience, I think that both this effort and your past performances on this topic fall quite a bit below the standards we have come to expect from The Times.
In what could be the single most important story of the Bush presidency, you found yourself squarely at the center. But rather than fulfill your obligation to your readers and your public trust, you seemed more concerned with federal shield laws and protecting one of your own reporters.
Even this last article does not delve into or shed further light on the crucial details - letting Ms. Miller's hazy recollection of where she learned about Valerie Plame go unchallenged. Robert Katz
Boulder, Colo., Oct. 16, 2005
• To the Editor:
Thank you for "The Miller Case: A Notebook, a Cause, a Jail Cell and a Deal."
In too many recent Times articles about the case, I felt as if The Times had been turned into Pravda, with everything interesting hidden between the lines.
After today's article, I understand why you took the actions you did, and respect your delicate balance between loyalty to your employee, protecting a crucial principle and transparency.
This last element was missing, but today you convinced one generally skeptical reader. Thank you for being what a true newspaper should be.
Alexander Boldizar
Brooklyn, Oct. 16, 2005
• To the Editor:
I have been an unequivocal supporter of Judith Miller's fight to protect her sources relating to the outing of Valerie Plame, not because I believed that they deserved protection, but because I recognized the principle that the protection of confidential sources is essential for the operation of a free press.
Nevertheless, it was disheartening to learn, from Ms. Miller's own account, how severely compromised her independence as a reporter had become through her reliance on access to I. Lewis Libby and other White House sources who were using her to manipulate how The Times covered the United States' war against Iraq.
The real betrayal, however, was that The Times "limited its own ability to cover aspects of one of the biggest scandals of the day" to protect both Ms. Miller and her sources.
In my view, The Times's first responsibility in covering the news should be not to itself and its reporters, but to its readers.
Rona Shamoon
Scarsdale, N.Y., Oct. 16, 2005
• To the Editor:
I really dislike your newspaper. I think that too many times you are blatantly biased. Your thinly veiled pro-liberal viewpoints actually harm your cause, since those of us who are Republicans learn to disregard your opinions as being predictable and, frankly, useless in any constructive debate about an issue.
Nonetheless, you deserve credit for your article about Judith Miller. Its criticisms of your paper and Ms. Miller were forthright and, by all appearances, sincere. It is about time.
Perhaps there are reasons for us conservatives to read your newspaper after all. Keep up the honesty. It becomes you.

Michael Speas
Mill Valley, Calif., Oct. 16, 2005
• To the Editor:
If Judith Miller investigated Judith Miller's story, even she would agree that it was full of holes and made no sense.

Barbara Davilman
Burbank, Calif., Oct. 16, 2005