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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
As the New York Times reporter was led away, many in the courtroom feared that the real victim was a free press.
Jul 7, 2005 | Minutes before Judge Thomas F. Hogan took the bench Wednesday, Judith Miller, the jail-bound New York Times reporter, handed her jewelry to her husband. "There it is," said another Times scribe, who noticed the exchange from the gallery. By all appearances, Miller was preparing for jail. Dozens of journalists watched from the courtroom, sullen and silent. Two of their own faced prison for upholding the most basic principle of the profession, for keeping their word. As one reporter said, it felt like the prelude to an execution. When Matt Cooper, Time Magazine's Washington correspondent, entered from a side door, ashen-faced and somber, he clutched the hand of his wife. She wore black sunglasses, as if to conceal that she had been crying.
About 90 minutes later, it was over. The dainty Miller was escorted off to jail by U.S. marshals twice her size. She will serve up to four months in a nearby prison for refusing to divulge the identity of a source who talked to her about Valerie Plame, a covert CIA agent outed by unknown administration officials in 2003 because her husband had criticized the White House. Cooper, on the other hand, received last-minute permission to divulge his source's identity to a grand jury investigating the matter, freeing him to go home to see his 6-year-old son. None of it made much sense, but then the investigation of the Plame leak never has. The columnist who revealed her secret identity, Robert Novak, appears to have never faced the threat of jail. Investigators have targeted two other reporters instead -- Miller, who never wrote about Plame, and Cooper, who only wrote about the craven motivations behind Novak's story. Many legal observers doubt that a crime has even been committed.
It was not just the journalists who were baffled. For the lawyers, the special counsel and even the judge, the court proceedings had all the trappings of a scene from Alice in Wonderland. "Your honor, I am not Alice," said Miller's attorney, Robert S. Bennett, when he rose to address the court. "But I somehow feel that I am. I am as perplexed as she was." Judge Hogan seemed to agree last week when he said the arguments in the case were becoming, as Alice would say, "curiouser and curiouser." Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald spoke of peering "through the looking glass" and down the "rabbit hole."
Only Cooper and Miller seemed to have a clear focus, even if they did make an odd couple exchanging glances across the defense table. Cooper is without question the most teddy bear-like member of the White House press corps, a family guy and a part-time standup comedian whose smile rivals that of John Edwards and whose imitation of Bill Clinton rivals that of Darrell Hammond. By contrast, Miller is coming off a run as journalism's femme fatale in a fierce brunette bob. Her role as Ahmed Chalabi's conduit for bogus WMD rumors helped seduce the nation into a false rationale for war. Now, just three years later, she has been remade as a sort of patron saint for the First Amendment. "My motive here is straightforward," she told the court, dressed casually in a quilted blue jacket. "A promise of confidentiality once made must be respected, or the journalist will lose all credibility and the public will, in the end, suffer."
Luckily for Cooper, he did not have to face that decision in the end, though few doubt that he would have gone to jail to protect his source. On Thursday, Norman Pearlstine, the editor in chief of Time Inc., released Cooper's notes to the special counsel, saying that the rule of law trumped Cooper's own wishes and his promise to a source. Then on Wednesday morning, moments before the court was to come to order, Cooper said his source contacted him. "A short time ago, in somewhat dramatic fashion, I received expressed personal consent from my source," he told the court. He remained silent on the source's identity, but agreed for the first time to answer Fitzgerald's questions. (According to grand jury regulations, the content of Cooper's testimony, including the identity of his source, will remain under seal until the grand jury completes its work. However, Cooper could conceivably write about his conversations with his source.) Though this is good news for Cooper, the implications for his profession are far less certain.
"I have not talked to a single reporter in the last five days who is not completely freaked out by this," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The reason has little to do with Miller or Cooper or the spy "administration officials" revealed to the public. Fitzgerald's investigation has targeted something far larger. He has attacked one of the core premises of a free press, the idea that journalists can assure sources who speak on condition of anonymity that they will not betray them. "Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality," Fitzgerald asserted in a court filing Tuesday. "No one in America is."
