I am sure there are many people who look on Judith Miller's jail time as justice because no court will send her to jail for her fiction that enabled the war. I am one of those people. And, OK, I am willing to be lectured by Andrew O'Hehir on that.

However, what the writer does not address is the fact that Judith Miller is going to jail because what she claims to protect is, by itself, a criminal act. She is not protecting someone who provided her information on a criminal act (as in Felt/Woodward) -- the act of passing on the information was, itself, a criminal act.

To paraphrase the other reader, I hope she rots.

-- Srabani Banerjee

As I tell my children, sometimes doing the right thing doesn't feel good, but that doesn't mean it's not right.

I hate the way the press spent Bush's first term playing compliant lapdog. As Andrew O'Hehir points out, Judy Miller was perhaps one of the most egregious, especially in her WMD reports. But... however much I would love to see the perpetrator nailed for leaking Valerie Plame's identity (and we'll see if the Bush administration can push its slime quotient any higher by giving Rove a pass, assuming it really was him), the press' ability to use confidential sources appropriately and keep them confidential is crucial.

Note the word "appropriately." The respect and trust of the public cannot be maintained when reporters use unreliable or unsubstantiated anonymous sources and then have to retract their stories days later. When it reaches the point where the Capitol Steps are using Newsweek retractions as gag lines in their ads (not just their skits), you know there is a problem.

-- Karen Kasper

I still find myself mystified by Salon's coverage of Judith Miller's incarceration for refusing to cooperate with a federal prosecutor investigating a serious violation of federal law. The recent opinion piece by Andrew O'Hehir simply proves that he may be so blinded by his own biases that he cannot discern why it is that people largely disagree with the media's position on this case. Believe it or not, I don't want Miller to go to jail because I think it's karmic justice, or because I don't like her or because I want to see Karl Rove fired and to imply that this the root of our position is insulting.

Miller is not being incarcerated for writing anything. She's hasn't been targeted as a political enemy. She's not in jail for speech and the principle that was involved in the Skokie case isn't remotely related. Press freedom doesn't mean that the press is free to do anything it wants. The Constitution doesn't say that members of the media can refuse to provide information to the federal government when a serious crime has been committed; it says that journalists cannot be jailed for writing things. She may be a journalist, but this isn't about journalism. Whoever gave her whatever information she has concerning this criminal act is not a "confidential source" for an article, because she didn't write one. Being a "journalist" doesn't give a person rights beyond those of ordinary Americans.

The bigger constitutional principle being defended here is the rule of law and the idea that all Americans are treated equally under that law. Is O'Hehir saying that our society should maintain a double standard? Can powerful people get away with criminal activities simply by tricking journalists into shielding them? Shouldn't we step back and realize that the Novak "story" wasn't even journalism, that any "sources" that provided information concerning Valerie Plame were actually using and manipulating our free press to silence and discredit a political opponent? Is the media incapable of admitting that they were, and have been and continue to be duped into serving as the instrument of a political party? Where is the outrage at Novak? Why aren't journalists outraged at being used as political pawns by Karl Rove? Isn't the greater threat to press freedom and freedom in general the threat of the media turning into an instrument of the controlling political party?

-- Joseph Bell

Andrew O'Hehir -- himself an excellent journalist -- argues well for why Judy Miller being in prison matters, but I'm not entirely convinced. I wonder: Was Judy Miller really practicing journalism at the time? Reporting is an activity, not a mere identity. A reporter doesn't have blanket immunity from ever testifying anywhere. If Karl Rove (or Libby, or Cheney, or Chalabi) leaked Plane's covert identity to Miller and she is refusing to divulge the contents of that conversation, then yes, she should be privileged to keep that secret. (That's not the state of federal law, though, as the NY Times itself noted.) In that case she's a martyr to the ideal of the free press. But one thing that's shockingly clear after the Matt Cooper ballet is that Patrick Fitzgerald knows more about what's actually going with this case than do we in the public -- and he can't talk about it yet.

Specifically, we don't know if he is seeking to have Miller testify as to what she said rather than as to what she heard. If she wants to hide her role in a conspiracy to discredit Joe Wilson -- as, in effect, an activist rather than a journalist -- then why should we applaud what is then her misuse of the reporter's privilege? This is where her background matters: She has given the public little reason to trust her reasons or her reasoning. I can't recall another case where it was unclear whether a journalist asserting the privilege was actually operating as a journalist at all. (Why didn't she publish a story on the matter? How uncharacteristic!) So I'm not sure that the bad example this sets is widely applicable.

To me, the surprise of Cooper's cooperation is that he wouldn't talk about Rove even after being given a general waiver from him out of concern that the waiver was "coerced." (Rove was coerced? Does that even begin to make sense?) Cooper cooperated only after Rove's lawyer claimed that Cooper wasn't going to jail to protect Rove -- evidently not so. If Miller is in jail to protect Rove, why doesn't she accept Rove's blanket waiver to testify even now, and walk free? Can someone ask Luskin whether Miller has Rove's permission to testify about whatever he told her? If she's protecting Rove in spite of explicit (and, come on, not even conceivably coerced) permission to testify, then why should we be concerned about her? Can she have a viable privilege when the source isn't demanding protection?

Maybe Miller wants to be a martyr even if the privilege doesn't demand it. She gives the impression not just that she is willing to pay the price of imprisonment, but that she fully embraces it -- perhaps thinking it will do for her what it did for Martha Stewart. But why won't she talk to the grand jury even now, when Rove's role in spreading this story to Cooper is already known? Does she really have more information that's not yet public? Or does she just not want to be the second witness required to convict Rove or perjury? If the latter, is that the kind of thing reporter's privilege is supposed to protect?

Unfortunately, it seems all too plausible that Miller is doing time because she wants to come out as a free speech martyr (and, incidentally, then be able to trash her enemies on the left for not supporting her.) She'll write books and the GOP will put her high on the best-seller list. Worth a few months of prison? She may well think so -- especially if she's really covering up her own misbehavior by cloaking it in journalistic garb. Maybe we'll find out if and when we find out what was said to the grand jury. But, unfortunately, we can't take her word as to what she is doing and why.

So, without knowing the answers to these questions, I can't jump on the Free Judy bandwagon. I'm interested in whether O'Hehir thinks that he knows the definitive answers to these questions or whether he thinks they don't matter. Reasonable minds can disagree about this one, so I don't think that those of us unconvinced that the reporter's privilege truly applies in this case ought to be tarred with the brush O'Hehir waves at us.

-- Greg Diamond

I'm sorry, but I still can't figure out how you get from "freedom of the press" to an absolute right of confidentiality between a reporter and her source. Virtually all professions that have confidentiality arrangements (doctors, lawyers, psychologists, priests, etc) have clear limits on this right. The judges have stated that, in this case, even if a limited right of confidentiality exits between a reporter and her source, Fitzgerald (the special prosecutor) has presented sufficient evidence to overcome any such right. Without seeing this evidence, we can't make a judgment call as to whether or not the judges were right in this particular case, but I see no flaw in this reasoning. If you can't yell, "Fire!" in a crowded theater, why should you be able to cover up a crime (the leaking of an undercover CIA agent's identity to the press) by claiming journalistic privilege?

-- Frank Probst

Sorry, Salon, Judith Miller is not a martyr. The Chalabi dump, the U.N. dump and now the Wilson dump are all exactly the same. She took a story directly from someone in the administration and ran with it. She has not spoken of any bare-minimum fact checking on any of these three stories to see whether they were true before putting it into the NY Times.

In this story (and others) it is assumed that she was "duped." Really, how do we know that she even cared whether it was true? If she doesn't talk about checking the veracity of her stories it certainly appears that she doesn't care.

Secondly, there is an inherent difference in taking sources of the most powerful levels of government and let them use you to put out false stories undercover and punishing enemies vs. taking a story from lower down that the powerful are trying to hide. Judith Miller did the former, repeatedly.

Third is the issue of whether or not Judith Miller should have given the promise of anonymity in the first place. It was the policy of the Times (supposedly) not to use anonymous sources unnecessarily -- and she did. She agreed to become a conduit of dis-information.

That the NY Times and Judith Miller are trying to wrap themselves around the flag of free speech now is pathetic.

-- Samuel Knight

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