[Mb-civic] Miller's Big Secret - Dan Froomkin - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Miller's Big Secret

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, September 30, 2005; 12:03 PM

Can it be? That after all that, New York Times reporter Judith Miller 
sat in jail for 12 weeks to protect the confidentiality of a very senior 
White House aide -- even though the aide repeatedly made it clear he 
didn't want protecting?

That somehow Miller was more intent on keeping their conversations 
secret than the aide was?

Miller was released from jail yesterday and showed up this morning at a 
federal courthouse to testify before the grand jury investigating the 
leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative.

The man she was protecting, it turns out, was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, 
the chief of staff for Vice President Cheney -- sometimes called "Dick 
Cheney's Dick Cheney" on account of his considerable influence in the 
White House.

Over the course of the investigation, Libby had freed several other 
reporters from any obligation to keep their conversations with him 
secret -- and his lawyer had apparently told Miller's lawyer more than a 
year ago that she was free to talk, as well.

So what was Miller doing in jail? Was it all just a misunderstanding? 
The most charitable explanation for Miller is that she somehow concluded 
that Libby wanted her to keep quiet, even while he was publicly -- and 
privately -- saying otherwise. The least charitable explanation is that 
going to jail was Miller's way of transforming herself from a 
journalistic outcast (based on her gullible pre-war reporting) into a 
much-celebrated hero of press freedom.

Note to reporters: There is nothing intrinsically noble about keeping 
your sources' secrets. Your job, in fact, is to expose them. And if a 
very senior government official, after telling you something in 
confidence, then tells you that you don't have to keep it secret 
anymore, the proper response is "Hooray, now I can tell the world" -- 
not "Sorry, that's not good enough for me, I need that in triplicate." 
And if you're going to go to jail invoking important, time-honored 
journalistic principles, make sure those principles really apply.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/09/30/BL2005093000669.html?nav=hcmodule
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