Judith Miller, (while being held out by the right-wing as the Rosa Parks of the just-discovered"
press freedom" movement), is really nothing more than a stool pigeon, who sat in jail to cover up evidence of a crime. A crime that her friends in the Bush administration have carried out in the run up to the Iraq War.
Those friends, key members of the "culture of corruption" in Washington, may have committed additional criminal acts, which go beyond the scope of merely leaking the undercover status of CIA operative Valerie Plame as retribution against her husband Joseph Wilson.
The press, (like drunks being easily distracted by a shiny object dangled by their right-wing masters), have failed to ask the obvious questions. It simply does not make sense to claim that Miller's source in the Plame-leak matter, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, released her completely from her obligation to conceal his identity before she went to prison. Miller will now have us believe that because of a simple misunderstanding with Libby, she sat in jail for three months --only to emerge now, the misunderstanding cleared up.
It is apparent that the deal she cut with Patrick Fitzgerald had EVERYTHING to do with why she will now cooperate in the probe and NOTHING to do with a simple misunderstanding with Scooter. Why was limiting the scope of her testimony to ONLY matters regarding the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity the deal breaker?
It is obvious --because she has information of criminality beyond that of the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity and it implicates her neo-con cronies in the Bush administration. She does not want to implicate other neo-cons, (after all, like the aspens they are all connected at the roots), but she has agreed to cooperate in this specific matter because she doesn't want to stay in jail forever.
While that is obviously bad news for the players involved in the leak, like Libby and Karl Rove, it also brings up the real possibility that Patrick Fitzgerald will not look into the broader criminality of leaking classified information by the Bush administration --beyond merely Plame's identity (aluminum tubes and other highly secret information that appeared in Miller's pre-Iraq War writings come to mind). If that is the case a severe injustice by the culture of corruption will go unpunished.
In any event, Judith Miller is no press freedom hero. The "source" Miller refuses to reveal is someone who has committed a crime, in such a case no journalistic privilege applies and any serious analyst knows that. If she knows of other crimes beyond leaking Valerie Plame's identity and she keeps them secret she is even more reprehensible. To pander to the concept of "press freedom", even in the case of concealing a crime, is just pure opprtunism because the concealed source is one of your corrupt cronies.
Balletshooz blogs at at Alpha Liberal.