Wrong Charge

8 July 2005



America Jails Reporter Without Trial

Judith Miller of the New York Times was jailed on Wednesday without trial for refusing to reveal a source to a grand jury. The legal term is “civil contempt of court,” but “fascism” is a much better description. Too often the word gets tossed around like a Frisbee at Malibu, haphazardly, but in this case, the shoe fits. By the same token, Ms. Miller should be on trial for inciting a war of aggression and misuse of the First Amendment to cause a breach of international law.

The grand jury case is a ridiculous one. Ms. Miller and Matthew Cooper of Time were facing contempt charges because they refused to testify before a grand jury investigating the revelation in a Robert Novak column that Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Mr. Novak cited two unidentified Bush administration as his sources (and as a right-wing propagandist posing as a serious newspaperman, he has that kind of access). Whoever they were, they violated a law passed in the 1980s to prevent American communist sympathizers from naming CIA operatives aiding indigenous death squads (both sides were morally wrong then). Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper had notes related to the incident but had published nothing. Time, fearing its parent corporation’s shareholders’ wrath, turned over Mr. Cooper’s notes, and he got his anonymous source’s permission to testify. Ms. Miller and the New York Times showed more bravery and refused.

The special prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald (who could easily win a Heinrich Himmler Think-A-Like contest), has said the grand jury’s work is all done except for the testimony of the two reporters. It would be beyond surprising if the difference between an indictment and no indictment hinged on these two and their notes. However, the grand jury had demanded their assistance, and they had refused citing the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press.

"We have to follow the law," US District Judge Thomas Hogan said in jailing Ms. Miller without a trial. She will stay there until she decides to testify or until the grand jury’s power lapses in October. Hogan added, "If she were given a pass today, then the next person could say as a matter of principle, 'I will not obey the law because of the abortion issue,' or the election of a president or whatever. They could claim the moral high ground, and then, we could descend into anarchy." Anarchy as a political state is bad, but far preferable to a police state because fewer murders occur (it takes a state to kill in large numbers), and there are no taxes.

Be that as a may, Judith Miller gets no sympathy here. Her reporting on the Iraqi non-existent weapons of mass destruction did more to sway undecided Americans to back Mr. Bush’s war of aggression than anything else including Colin Powell’s slide show at the Security Council. Either she was taken in by Iraqi exiles with an agenda or was a willing shill for a war; the difference is that between manslaughter and murder in the first degree. Either way, she deserves to be in jail, not for something as pitiful as contempt of court in Virginia but for war crimes in the Hague. But then, there are a lot of people who should be there who aren’t.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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