Miller jailed for refusing to reveal source

[polycarp]

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.c ... 5&fsrc=nwl

JUST how much protection does the First Amendment to America’s constitution offer the press? That freedom is limited, a federal judge said on Wednesday July 6th as he sent Judith Miller, a reporter for the New York Times, to prison. The judge wants Ms Miller to reveal which Bush administration operatives told her that the wife of a man who had criticised the administration was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. Ms Miller stood up for her profession, refusing to talk, and will now become a martyr for it.

But details of the odd case are sure to begin coming out anyway. Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine, was under similar threat from the judge. He had resigned himself to jail with Ms Miller, but at the last minute agreed to testify, after his source apparently released him from the need for confidentiality. Whether his source was the same as Ms Miller’s or not is unclear.

The scandal is now several years old. In 2002 the CIA sent Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat, to Africa to check on a disputed claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger. Mr Wilson found the claim bogus. Yet the Niger-uranium story nonetheless made it into George Bush’s state-of-the-union speech in the run-up to the Iraq war. A mistake, say the Bush people; a lie and a cover-up, Mr Wilson wrote in a 2003 article.

Soon after Mr Wilson’s article appeared, Bob Novak, a conservative journalist, revealed in a column about Mr Wilson’s trip that his wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA officer working on weapons of mass destruction. Ms Plame was almost certainly outed by Bush administration officials, perhaps in revenge for Mr Wilson’s crusading article. Her clandestine career was ruined and her intelligence contacts potentially endangered. Whoever revealed her identity to several journalists, Messrs Cooper and Novak and Ms Miller among them, might have committed a felony”though this requires that the leaker be someone with authorised access to secret information and behave in a way intended to harm national security. Thus it may not have been a crime, but merely a reprehensible act that should embarrass the administration.

But will anyone pay for it? Mr Novak certainly won’t go to jail”he did not have direct access to classified information. But why is he not facing a stretch inside for refusing to reveal his sources to the leak investigators, as Ms Miller is? No one is exactly sure. Mr Novak may have co-operated with the investigation led by Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor looking into the leak, though he will not admit doing so.

Other speculation has centred on Karl Rove, Mr Bush’s closest and most formidable political adviser. Rumours had long swirled that Mr Rove was the Plame leaker. Those whisperings grew louder last week when Time, saying it was not above the law as an institution, revealed Mr Cooper’s notes for a follow-up story he did on the leak. The notes revealed that he had talked to Mr Rove, whose lawyer then hurried in to insist that his client was not the leaker. Mr Rove has already testified to the investigation, and Mr Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, has told Mr Rove’s lawyer that he is not a “target” of the probe. Anti-Rove Democrats”of whom there are many, thanks to the Bush man’s talent for outfoxing them”are still hoping that he may yet come under close scrutiny. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the chief of staff to Dick Cheney, the vice-president, has also been rumoured to be the leaker, but his staff insists he has done nothing wrong.

Until more is known, only Ms Miller will taste jail food as a result of the case. Her lawyers asked that she be sentenced to house arrest, but on Tuesday Mr Fitzgerald argued that a cushy home-stay was not enough to make her co-operate. She may be jailed for the remaining duration of the investigation”up to four months. She makes an odd martyr for the anti-Bush left, however: before the Plame affair, she had been vilified by them for overly credulous reporting on Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

It is not yet clear if anyone else will do time. Mr Cooper’s testimony may lead to the unmasking of Ms Miller’s source or sources. That could allow her to testify and get out of jail, unless she insists on not testifying as a matter of principle and the investigators still require her to answer their questions. The leakers would then, presumably, themselves face prosecution. Others could face associated charges such as perjury, obstruction of justice or conspiracy.

What about the future of the journalist’s right to protect sources? Most American states have laws protecting scribblers from subpoena unless they have information that is vital and otherwise unobtainable. But no such statute exists at the federal level, where limits on the protection of reporters’ sources were imposed by a 1972 Supreme Court decision that the court last week declined to revisit. Until a federal law standardises what protection reporters can give their sources, the fate of Ms Miller is one that could await any journalist pursuing hard-to-get information.

[BTS]

You Ask:"JUST how much protection does the First Amendment to America’s constitution offer the press?"





She belongs in jail. The First Amendment guarantee of a free press protects the right to publish, it does not include the right to ignore the law.

Reporters are, after all, citizens. And while they enjoy the rights of citizens, they also must shoulder the responsibilities of citizens. That includes responding to subpoenas and respecting the authority of a United States attorney, a district judge and a federal grand jury.





If a reporter is subpoenaed and either deposed or compelled to testify, the only legal way to avoid giving truthful testimony is to invoke the protections of the Fifth Amendment. You can’t be forced to testify against yourself, but you can be forced to testify against others. Including your source. It’s the law. And that trumps honor and contract. Because the most honorable thing to do is to obey the law, and a contract requiring an illegal act is not binding.





This was her statement to the judge:



“If journalists cannot be trusted to guarantee confidentiality, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press. “The right of civil disobedience is based on personal conscience, it is fundamental to our system and it is honored throughout our society.”



That is, of course, a crock. Let’s take it in order. First, she asserts that without making promises to confidential sources, reporters can’t do their job and the press is not free. That argument is false on its face, as many news organizations prohibit confidential sources altogether and function quite well. Their reporters report and they operate as a free press. The second is, somehow, even more ridiculous. That’s because there is no right of civil disobedience. Nowhere is it mentioned in the Constitution or any other founding document, not until the Thoreau essay by the same name. Civil disobedience is the breaking of law because of conscience. It is not a right. If it were, it would not involve breaking the law. It is the accepting of law’s punishment in order to break a law one considers immoral. If the lady is honestly engaging in an act of civil disobedience, then she should gladly accept the punishment of the law. Ghandi did, and so did Martin Luther King Jr. This woman and her newspaper, and their defenders amongst the news elite, see a victimhood here which simply doesn’t exist. They claim for this reporter a special above-the-law status that neither she nor anyone else is entitled to. This is not an example of an oppressive government, it is an example of an arrogant reporter.



The First Amendment protects the right to publish without censorship, it does not grant immunity from law. Too many in the news business attach far too much importance to themselves and their jobs. They act almost as if they are royalty, superior to the common folk and officials they write about. They are far too high and mighty. And this one has discovered, much to her chagrin and surprise, that she is not above the law. And so she sits in a federal jail. Which is right where she belongs. Until she can obey the law like the rest of us.